THE 

FOEMS 

or 

PHILIP 
HENRY 
SAVAGE 



ili!^ 



iiii 



LIBRARY^OF CONGRESS. 

t'hap. _?^_'^2o'pyn?ht ]STo 

Slielf ..3 4- 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE POEMS OF 
PHILIP HENRY SAVAGE 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/poemsofphiliphenOOsava 



THE POEMS 



OF 



y 



PHILIP HENRY SAVAGE 

•t 

Edited^ with an Introduction^ by 
DANIEL GREGORY MASON 




BOSTON 
SMALL, MAYNARD, AND COMPANY 

MDCCCCI 



Copyright, i8gS, hy 
CoPELAND ^ Day 

Copyright, l8g8, by 
CoPELAND ^ Day 

Copyright, igoo, by 

Small, Maynard & Company 

(incorporated) 

Entered at Stationers* Hall 






89514 



Libi-arv of CoriQresa 

Two CoHtEs Rtrn^^EO 

DEC 171900 

St:;C^N^; COPY 

Ofiiivwort to 

ORDER DIVISION 
JAN 4 



Mi 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

Philip Henry Savage published, during his lifetime^ 
two small books of verse. First Poems and Fragments, 
which appeared in i8()Si and Poems, issued in i8g8. 
The present volume is a reprint of these books, with the 
addition of the best poems found in his portfolio after his 
death. Of the posthumous poems a few, marred by im- 
perfections of sense or of versification, have been slightly 
pruned ; but omissions have been in each case indicated by 
asterisks. The reader may rest assured that Savage'* s 
intentions have not been tampered with, though it is of 
course often questionable whether he himself would have 
considered fragmentary pieces worth printing at all. The 
Editor^ s plan has been not to omit a characteristic piece 
merely because of flaws, nor on the other hand to print 
anything that does not in some way contribute to the 
total impression of the writer^ s personality. Some poems 
written before the publication of the two books and in- 
cluded in neither, have been admitted because they seemed 
to contribute to that impression. 

The frontispiece portrait is from a negative taken by 
the Editor during the winter preceding Savage'* s death. 
It has been chosen for reproduction here, in spite of its 
exaggeration of the sadness of his face and its scant justice 

V 



PREFACE 

to bis good looks, because, on the whole, it gives his expres- 
sion, at once tentative and serious, rather more vividly 
than any other. It has much more value as a mental 
than as a physical portrait. 

The Editor wishes to express here his appreciation of the 
unfailing courtesy and generosity of his friend"* s family in 
putting papers at his disposal, and in every way forwarding 
his work. 



VI 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction, by Daniel Gregory Mason . . . . xv 



FIRST POEiMS iff FRAGMENTS 

[1895] 



Dedication 
Apology . 



To Gertrude Savage 



xxxvu 
xxxix 



SHORrER POEMS 

'Tis grace to sing to nature, and to pray " 

Even in the city, I'' 

When I look on Ossipee " 

Upon a pasture hill a pine-tree stands "" . 
What know I of the fields of fall " . . . 
The sea is silent round this rocky shore " . 
When February sun shines cold'' 
Still, in the meadow by the brook I lay " . 
In the first pale flush of even " . 
When evening comes and shadows gray '' . 
With all the soul within me and suppressed'' 
I love to walk against the yellow light ' ' 
The flash of sunlight from a bit of glass " . 
The influences of air and sky " .... 
A lark flew by upon the air" 
This is thy brother, this poor silver fish " . 
Far in the south the redwings hear and speed ' 
Thou little god within the brook" . 
Where man has conquered nature dies " 



3 
3 

4 
4 
5 
7 
8 

9 

9 

10 
II 
12 

^3 

14 

15 
16 

17 
17 
18 



VII 



CONTENTS 

SHORTER POEMS, continued page 

<* The breath of slowly-moving spring'' . . . . 19 

*< Something in the sense of morning " .... 19 

'* The road ran sloping through the trees'' ... 20 

'' I stood at the hedge as a hearse went by "" . . . 22 

** The scream of the tern in the roar of the waters'' 23 

*' Like a dead leaf that rolls along the ground " . . 24 

** Adam arose at the word of God" 25 

*< In long, slow silences of soul " 25 

<* If ever I have thought or said" 26 

LONGER POEMS 

A New England Mountain 31 

Near the White Ledge, Sandwich, N. H. . . . 32 

'< I left the city " 35 

The Song-Sparrow 38 

In Cherry Lane 40 

Woodstock 42 

The Hedgerow 47 

Solitude 50 

Putatis Lucum Ligna 54 



SONNETS 

<< The flood of life that turned away " 

''Ten thousand fancies flitting through the mind" 

*' Mercy ! Justice ! Ah, no ! Heaven's gate ! Heaven' 

gate!" 

<*I love the hills but she the open shore" . 
^' I cannot face the utterance of a prayer" 
* ' To catch at that which never can be caught ' 
<< A month ago the cloud alone was fair" 
<* A thousand flowerets of a thousand hues " 
*< I stood long time and listened to the wind" 
Moosilauke in December 



59 

60 

61 

62 

63 

64 

65 
66 

67 
68 



Vlll 



CONTENTS 

SONNETS, continued page 

*' The poet stoops and plucks a little flower"*' . . 72 

*< I hate the vast array of * modern ' things **' . . 73 

'' High on a sunward-mounting precipice " ... 74 

<< Honey of woodland wild and of the hill "" . . . 75 

<' The warm, moist kiss of April on the grass " . . 76 

" I laid upon a rock beside the sea'"* 77 

FRAGMENTS 

<< In the low-lying April afternoon '' 81 

<* Westward I walked 5 the sun was low 5 the plain " 82 

' ' The wild-eyed, savage gull, with bow' d wing, tips " 83 

*« At sunset in the college close the light" . . . 84 

«< When the low sun descends on Hamlet hill '' . . Z^ 

POEMS 

[1898] 

Dedication : To Citriodora 89 

<' Spinoza polished glasses clear" 91 

<*If one should call my branching verse" . . . . 91 

•'Brother, Time is a thing how slight" . . . . 91 

<< < Believe in me ! ' Lord, who art thou" .... 92 

March 20 92 

The Sparrow 94 

Presto 95 

In Dove Cottage Garden 96 

A Wreath of Buds and Lavender 98 

Sweet Thorn 98 

Sllkweed , 99 

The Fire-Fly loi 

Clear and Far . . loi 

Architecture • .... 102 

ix 



CONTENTS 

^ PAGE 

To a Pine-Tree 103 

Opal 103 

Morning 104 

*' I know not what it is, but when I pass'\ . . . 104 

Anadyomene 105 

Processional no 

To a Bull-Frog in 

Rose in Gray 112 

To Flowers 113 

On Coming of Age 114 

" It is long waiting for the dear companions'* . . . 114 

*^ Mary, when the wild-rose" 115 

In a Garden 116 

Neptunian 118 

Shakespeare 119 

The Water-Clock 120 

<< We welcome lightly and with ease " 120 

In August 120 

Dog-Days 121 

'< Through rain the forest, roof and floor" . . . . 122 

Fagots 122 

October 10 123 

<* God, thou art good, but not to me " . . . . 123 

The Pine-Tree 124 

<* I dare not think that thou art by, to stand" . . 125 

The Anchor 126 

*^ The frost has walked across my world " . . . . 126 

The Quiet Harvest 127 

The Maple-Tree 127 

In Memoriam. — Patsey 128 

<< The ivy leaves, (behind the shed)" 129 

Greek and Christian 129 

Dissolution 130 

November 130 

Against Forgiveness 131 

X 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Confession 13^ 

November-Blind i33 

Winter a Cavern i34 

On a Weed, uncovered by the Rains in December . 134 

December i34 

Isaiah vi:i3 ^35 

New England 13^ 

Serene ^37 

<< From Billerica forth I send" 137 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

[1901] 

«« Not all the world can banish from my eyes" . . 141 

For March 20 141 

<« The faithful mullein, day by day"" 142 

A March Flaw 142 

<« Here by the brimming April streams" .... 143 

<« The bobolink that sweetly sings "" 144 

Apple-Blossoms 144 

<* Roll down, roll down, thou darkling earth'' . . . 146 

''Hot days like this will wound or bless" . . . . 146 

" Worn with the city, out I go " 147 

October 10 148 

On the Tenth of October 148 

*' Up from hill and meadow burning" 149 

** Three camping grounds I passed to-day" . . . 149 

Prayer for Grace 150 

In November 150 

<< What is this stone, unless some cry" 152 

*' A beetle bug has bit my coat " 152 

*< What hard, bright Spirit sits beyond the stars" . . 153 

David and Jonathan 154 

xi 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

The Mystic 154 

<« When the last candle Is put out" 155 

<« What are the limitations hard" 155 

To G. S. (on a postal card) 156 

The Chickadee's Song 157 

To G. S 158 

To G. S 159 

To H. L. S 159 

« There are women In London and Paris and Rome " 160 

< Day by day along the street'' 161 

' The world is crossed at sixes and at sevens" . . 162 

'Love Is a life you cannot trace" 163 

* The spring has not so many flowers" . . . . 163 
' Dear heart, that In this world must live and die" . 163 

'The hollow chambers of the moon" 164 

' The shad-bush, sweetheart, Is in flower " . . . 164 

'Wreck of the winter upcast into April" . . . . 164 

'My sisters have their loves, but I" 165 

Red Rose and White 166 

'I mark you coming the accustomed way'' . . . 167 

' The extreme beauty and the dear delight" . . . 167 

' I laugh for the long days I see ahead" . . . . 168 

Fragment of a Sonnet 169 

' When Love dies, and the funeral plumes are set" . 169 

* Swampscott over the eastern sea " 170 



xu 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 



THERE is no flower so difficult to dissect, so im- 
possible to reconstruct, as the personality of a man. 
It defies analysis ; as fast as we pluck apart its petals, 
their perfume exhales and they are left withered in 
our hands. When I first undertook to write, for the 
final edition of his poems, a short memoir of Philip 
Henry Savage, I little realized the elusiveness of the 
task. It seemed easy and pleasant to communicate to 
others my deep and lasting impression of my friend. 
But soon I found that his friendship was a possession I 
could not share, his gentle, strong personality a presence 
in my life that was after all incommunicable. His 
feminine perception, so sensitive to beauty and so rich in 
tact ; his courageous manliness, daring to probe the gris- 
liest places in life ; his pure ardency of spirit ; his gayety 
and quaintness of humor ; his wide hospitality of mind ; 
his stern and yet pagan personal ideal : all these elements 
made up a personality that might perhaps be suggested, 
but never could be livingly reproduced. He was young 
when he died ; he developed slowly ; his last year of 
life, when his poetic faculty was much more perfect than 
ever before, was a time of distraction and anxiety : so 
that even his poetry, a mirror of his very self for those 
who knew him, reflects him for others but brokenly and 
vaguely. But if I cannot hope that the most discerning 

XV 



INTRODUCTION 

reader will discover completely the man behind the 
poems, yet my task here must be to aid, however 
slightly, such a quest. I shall outline in the following 
pages the salient features of Savage's mind and spirit, — 
features which, combined as nature knew how to com- 
bine them, revealed one of the best men I have known. 

At first meeting, one saw that Savage was a man of 
refinement and of personal dignity, that he cherished 
ideals and respected himself. He seemed what we call 
a quiet man, though he always talked enough and with 
grace ; his presence was bright and cheerfully courteous 
rather than brilliant. Gradually, deeper qualities revealed 
themselves. His steady blue eyes reassured one, his 
slender yet vigorous figure gave one a sense of manliness 
and fidelity. His face, with its rough-textured skin, 
well creased and of a sallow or ashen color, reinforced 
the impression of strength, and suggested, in spite of its 
mobility, a physical temperament of the melancholy type. 
Yet, so shifidng were his moods and so responsive his 
features, an instant could turn sadness into expectancy, 
or fill the serious eyes with banter. His mind seemed to 
demand of his body a greater pliancy of expression than 
had been given it, its proper quality being strength 
rather than delicacy. In spite of the sensitiveness that 
was clearly written on every feature, it might be said 
that he would have been physically almost apathetic had 
he not been mentally so alert. And his talk emphasized 
the same contradiction. Though his voice was dull and 
unvibrant, and his enunciation indistinct, his pleasure in 
talking was so obvious, and his quaint doublings and 
sudden interjections and apostrophes and parentheses 
and self-interruptions so novel and characteristic, that 

xvi 



INTRODUCTION 

one loved to listen to him. Nor must I forget his little 
mannerisms and airs, — how he would cuff one foot 
against the other as he stood in the doorway, in depreca- 
tion or mock apology ; how he would throw one hand 
into the air with a sudden exclamation ; how in an even- 
ing walk, giving no warning, he would suddenly deafen 
us with a wild and hollow Indian war-whoop. In a 
thousand ways he had a knack of making his moods real 
to others, of enlivening them with his curious and lovable 
whims. 

But Savage's social charm is interesting to us here 
chiefly because, like a vapor that exhales from a volatile 
liquid, it suggests what deeper quality permeated his 
mind and gave it its flavor. In the analysis we have 
promised ourselves, the first consideration must be this 
deeper quality of sensitiveness. 

His every word and act was a revelation, now super- 
ficial, now profound, of his really feminine purity and 
delicacy of perception. It spoke alike in his quick sense 
of the moods of others and in his most exalted delight in 
natural beauty, though perhaps the latter was its more 
primal expression. One cannot read three pages of his 
book without seeing what a passionate disciple the beauty 
of the world found in him. His first word is 

" Even in the city, I 
Am ever conscious of the sky" 5 

and he returns to the same thought in the six lines that 
introduce the posthumous poems : 

*' Not all the world can banish from my eyes 
The simple glories of the day's sunrise ; 
^ xvii 



INTRODUCTION 

Not circumstance nor fate e'er drive away 
The clear perfection of one summer day, 
Nor blot quite wholly from my sight 
The singing tumult of the mystic night." 

The accuracy of his insight is unfailing ; and whether 
he describes the forest which ^* through rain is green as 
it was ne'er before," or the early winter sun which 
'^ lays by every stem a hue most sagely, delicately blue," 
his page always reflects the object with fidelity and with the 
finest precision. Even the First Poems and Fragments y 
prosaic and diffuse as they often are, frequently charm us 
with a touch of this delicate observation. And his note- 
books and letters are full of scribbled memoranda that 
want only manipulation to make them into poems. 
Here is a botanical note in verse, found in the portfolio : 

" Sand hill violets are pale 
Like the sunny innocents, 
Like the evening primrose frail, 
Wanting wholly the intense 
Azure of the cousin-flower that stands 
In the fertile bottom lands." 

And in letters I find the following characteristic bits of 
description : 

** There is a little family of two — sparrows — nested 
in a sheltered angle of the water-spout on the house 
opposite my side-window ; not thirty feet from me now. 
They are companions of mine, chirping early and late ; 
happy ; waiting for the eggs to hatch. . . . Busy, busy, 
busy, about the fundamental things. N'est-ce pas ? " 

'* I just had the finest hour of the autumn. I rode 
from Cambridge, in this wild wind out of the sunset ; 

xviii 



INTRODUCTION 

and I 'm going back after dinner, and home again at 
eleven. The Harvard Bridge is a rare spot, and the 
ducks like the river as v^ell as I." 

The half-boyish delight he took in the world of out- 
of-doors was so highly characteristic of him (little as it 
seems to comport with the sombre tone of his verses, so 
full of an Omar-like sense of the fleetingness of life) that 
it deserves illustration in a longer letter describing a July- 
day on Mirror Lake in Wolfborough : 

*' Dear : We were up at three. At 3.05, 

though the room was so light I needed no candle to 
dress, I could not distinguish my red (right) garter from 
my black (left), which surprised me. A whippoorwill 
shouted busily, just under my window. He, besides 
the frog which sings all night long ^ u-ung ' like Neddie, 
is the only distinctive night-bird. We were on the 
lake an hour before sunrise, which was to-day at 4.29. 
The white lilies were unopened as I paddled the canoe 
among them. Shortly after venturing out irregular 
twitterings began in the low copse where the high white 
eastern light penetrated. The hills, Ossipee, began to 
show a glowing purplish hue. A bank of cloud over 
the sun (belov/ the horizon) grew rosy with a sharp in- 
fusion of dust-color. From that time on this cloud was 
the centre of attention, and its whole progression was 
from the color named above through ever more brilliant 
golden rose, to so sharp and hot a metal that even before 
the edge of the sun himself appeared it was dazzling and 
overpowering to the eye. 

*^ Troops of white mist came out of the shallow bay 
and moved in procession like the spirits among whom Fran- 

xix 



INTRODUCTION 

cesca was borne, down the lake in ever-diminishing line. 
They were a continual presence till long after the sun 
appeared, whether we turned to watch the bream on their 
nests under the shallow wake, or noted how the yet white 
light refracted into varying color on clouds and hills. 
Then through the flashing lights the fire itself was bom. 

*' Roll down, roll down, O night-enfolded, dewy earth. 
And wash thee clean in the east where the crystal waves 

of light 
Sweep from the mystical deep to the roseate throes of birth. 
Wake and redeem and transfigure the children of night. 
• ••••••• 

*'The afternoon saw a tramp through a sphagnum 
swamp, sleep, and the completion of a further arc of the 
shore. The evening twilight was soft and gray, through 
a curtain of clouds ; with color, yellow and saiFron to 
rose, to the west of Ossipee toward the Sandwich Moun- 
tains. Supper on a sand -beach facing west ; and after, 
a long contemplation, while the fagots crumbled and fell. 
We left a litde rosy heap on the sands, shining in the 
face of the late twilight. It was dark when we reached 
the plank wharf; we had taken seventeen hours to go 
round the lake two and a half miles. 



*« Oceans, awake ! and hills ; ye lakes and slumbrous valleys, 
Over ye all and the city' s roofs, and the darkened town. 
Through the empurpurate air from the wealth of his aureate 

chalice, 
Lo ! the sun has poured a magical influence down. 

Hooray ! 

Philip.*' 

XX 



INTRODUCTION 

As would be expected. Savage's sensitiveness to natural 
beauty involved pain as v^ell as pleasure, in so far as he 
was constrained to an artificial and ^^ civilized " life. 
There resulted a disharmony which he recognized now 
laughingly, now with sorrow. The reader cannot but 
have been struck with the undertone of sadness in the 
lines already quoted from the posthumous poems ; and 
the same distaste of drudgery is quaintly voiced in a 
stray quatrain : 

<« Brick sidewalks and the stony street 
Make weary walking for the Muse. 
I cannot blame her halting feet 5 — 
God knows they were not meant for shoes." 

Equally whimsical and equally sincere is a plaint Sav- 
age wrote from his office in the Public Library during 
alterations made there one muggy August : 

*^ Dear : Observe the commercial method of dat- 
ing this sheet, and realize the pace at which I began it. 
I now breathe three times and start anew. 

'^ You cannot write too often. I love your letters, if 
I may say so ; and you can have no idea how they come 
like a strain of music across the dull blows of iron ham- 
mer on granite which are the trunk and branch of the vi- 
brations I hear. In the Library, truly, where plaster and 
granite-dust float like a palpable, visible atmosphere, the 
heavens and the earth (forgive me) are one flour." 

The same sensitiveness that made Savage so responsive 
to naturai beauty gave him a very tender, sympathy with 
people. All his friends remember how prehensile he was, 

xxi 



INTRODUCTION 

how he never obtruded his own mood, but felt about for 
the mood of his companion. He had the liveliest inter- 
est for our fortunes and misfortunes, and his counsel, 
though always bracing and tonic, was never hard or self- 
blinded. His sympathy with men does not voice itself 
in the poems, to be sure, so eloquently as the scarcely 
less personal sympathy he felt with nature. He himself 
writes regretfully : 

^'I keep with loving eye and ear 
Attention on the changing year. 
I cannot bid in numbers flow 
The human passions that I know ; 
Nor weave into the lyric line 
The sacrificial heart divine 5 
Be mine the shame, the burden mine." 

But even if the self-impeachment shadow a truth, it is a 
partial truth, and one far less applicable to his later than 
to his earlier work. In one of the poems to '* G. S." 
there is keen appreciation of the ** sacrificial heart divine," 
even if the lines into which it is woven lack something 
of lyric fire. And in the poem beginning '* Day by day 
along the street," written several years later, the beauty 
of the style matches the tenderness of the emotion. The 
love-poems at the end of the book, also, are an earnest 
of what he might have done in this sort, had he lived. 

But if we do not find that Savage's delicate perception 
failed him at any point, this does not mean that adverse 
criticism is not both possible and necessary. It is pos- 
sible, because like others he had the defects of his quali- 
ties : it is necessary, because faults are the natural shadows 
that give body to virtues, and a portrait painted with high 

xxii 



INTRODUCTION 

lights alone will show a mere Sir Charles Grandison, both 
flat to look at and unprofitable to contemplate. Savage's 
mind, then, like many minds that act chiefly by intui- 
tion, was weak in logical power, unable to develop 
a long train of thought with sequence and coherence. 
His conversation was scrappy and unmortared ; he 
brought out his thoughts singly, with little reference to 
what had just been said ; minds that were strong where 
his was weak found talk with him baffling and unsatisfy- 
ing. On the other hand, for those who did not demand 
sustained grasp, but accepted insight in its stead, he talked 
always with charm, and often persuasively. Like the 
heroine in the fairy story, his mouth dropped diamonds, 
and they were not less bright because they did not form 
a necklace. His exclamations and interjections and sud- 
den turnings were delightful to us ; we used to rejoice in 
his ** asides," self-admonitory or abusive. ^^ Tut, tut. 
Savage," he would cry, in the midst of something else, 
and cuff his feet together. Non-sequaciousness, however, 
was no doubt a more serious handicap to him in his writ- 
ing : it was the infirmity which circumscribed his work 
to the short lyric form he cultivated with such success ; 
every effbrt he made in the direction of larger outlines or 
more ambitious schemes was disappointing. He could 
not sustain and vitalize a long poem. Thoughts would 
not stay dissolved in his mind, but quickly formed into 
isolated crystals. They were perfect, but they were 
small. Still, it would be foolish to insist too much on 
the negative aspect. We have only to reverse our em- 
phasis to see that, even if they were small, they were per- 
fect. And then we shall accept Savage as a miniaturist, a 
worker in precious stones, just as we have accepted Her- 

xxiii 



INTRODUCTION 

rick and other kindred geniuses, not demanding of them a 
breadth of which they are incapable. 

The reader should not infer, either from what I have 
said of Savage's logical shortcomings, or from my insistence 
upon his basically feminine qualities of mind, that there 
was about him any trace of the effeminate, any tendency 
to the feeble or the flabby. His weaknesses were intel- 
lectual rather than sentimental. They were the negative 
weaknesses of limitation, not the positive weaknesses of 
morbidness or sentimentality. Manliness reveals itself 
in sanity and balance of mind as well as in the main force 
we generally associate with it, and his manliness was of 
this sort, giving his smallest poems a tone of such solidity 
and health that we may without paradox apply to them 
the word ** large." If a man have healthy and gov- 
erned sense, his mental processes may be as intuitive as a 
woman's and we shall only admire the more that rare in- 
teraction of powers that produces an individuality at once 
finely sensitive and thoroughly wholesome. And if we 
needed any further testimony than we have in his poems 
that Savage's sensuous appreciations were thus made 
wholesome by a steady spiritual control, we could find 
it in a formulation of the principle of such control which 
he gives in his note-book. 

^^ In order to enjoy life," he says, '* one must be a 
master of life. In order to enjoy the senses one must be 
a master of them. No ordinary pleasure is so great but 
its rejection serves to throw out into relief this greater ; 
no task so stern but that endurance is sterner ; no pain so 
fierce but it wakes the soul to secret laughter. 

^^ In another mood, the kiss of the senses is beautiful 
beyond all and every abstraction ; the touch of sunlight, 

xxiv 



INTRODUCTION 

the glory of form and color, the magic of sound, the joy 
of human embraces, the passion of sex. 

^^ These two moods are the great rhythmical heart-beat, 
the systole and diastole of human life. The one a gath- 
ering of materials from all the realms of beauty, the other 
a consumption of them to feed the most perfect flame. 
The one centrifugal, the other centripetal." 

If Savage was feminine in his appreciation for beauty, 
if he was feminine also in his logical and constructive 
limitation, he was masculine in healthiness and normality 
of sense, and he was nobly masculine in that sort of spir- 
itual enthusiasm which made him hold himself above the 
very gratifications that appealed so potently to one-half 
his nature, in order to give a perfect allegiance to its 
central authority. 

Such is a brief analysis of the permanent and stable 
characteristics of the man. Now that it is made, how- 
ever, we see only the more clearly that any such static 
analysis, especially of a personality so fluid, so evolving, 
so dynamic as Savage's, must be in the end unsatisfying. 
More characteristic of him than any trait that v^e can de- 
scribe was the lapse, the flow, the ceaseless recrystalliza- 
tion of traits. His growth was not uniform, as in men 
of less quickness of mind, but many-sided, various, and 
unforeseen, like the ramifications of ice-cryitals on a win- 
dow-pane. So impressible was he, his development was 
almost as complex as the outer influences affecting him. 
He reacted on his environment, as the learned say, with 
unusual delicacy. Furthermore, he added to this native 
impressibility the habit of pondering his impressions. 
Meditation shaped his life nearly as much as circum- 

XXV 



INTRODUCTION 

stance. Very remarkable was his intellectual alertness ; 
he analyzed his feelings, returned upon his experiences, 
and perennially chewed the cud of introspection. 
Whether to dwell in the country or in the city ; 
whether to mix with people or to take much solitude; 
whether to be a pagan or a Christian ; what to renounce 
and whether to renounce anything, — these were problems 
that he recognized and grappled. Of the tirelessness of 
his thinking the jottings and memoranda in his note-books 
give a forcible impression. I select a few examples almost 
at random : 

*^I must break up my year into sections, and live 
according to season. 

^* Study the map for a tramp. 

** I never take a step in the woods but I stop, jealous 
of advance, lest I lose some part of the joy and signifi- 
cance in beauty of each outward movement. Mystery 
and unexplained delight. 

^* Don't waste your spirit in impatience. 

*^ I thought of Thoreau, and took my courage tight 
between my teeth. 

'^ Every morning now I ought to sit at my desk. 

*^ Now is the time to begin to walk, and with the note- 
book. Remember that hawk, and the ease with which the 
thoughts took form with him in sight — all gone now, alas ! 

" A continual quick shift between vital personal rela- 
tionships and verse. 

'^ Master of a little beauty which, because it is born 
and bearer of the divine essence, I will cherish at the ex- 
pense of most of the concerns of life." 

Savage's outward actions, again, bear witness to the 
same combination of sensibility and introspection, pro- 

xxvi 



INTRODUCTION 

ducing his characteristic eclecticism. They were very- 
various, and their variety resulted not from confusion or 
from deficient self-control, but from a deliberate desire to 
live sensitively, responsively. His idea v^as to trust the 
ultimate harmony of his instincts ; each was to be obeyed 
as it revealed itself, and all were to produce an uncon- 
strained evolution. From day to day he faced and in- 
terrogated the bewildering complex of a youth's experience: 
observing, comparing, recording ; conversing, reading, 
pondering ; experimenting, practising, attempting. All 
his doings, at first sight surprisingly diverse, fall, when 
looked at as illustrating this eclecticism, into the unity of 
a series of educative experiences. Each was dictated by 
some inward necessity, some craving to be satisfied, some 
knowledge to be supplied, some weakness to be trained 
into strength. 

Born in 1868, he did not enter Harvard College 
until 1889, that is, until he was already of age, but 
spent the years from 'S6 to '89 in business. For these 
three years he was what is technically known as a 
^^ drummer" of boots and shoes. He wrote home to his 
family, from remote towns in Maine or Pennsylvania, 
long letters in which news of the shoe business is oddly 
mingled with descriptive bits about sunsets and red- 
winged blackbirds. Of course the life was ultimately 
impossible for him, and getting from it a good deal of 
experience of some kinds of people he gave it up and 
entered college. Here he was shy and quiet, studious, 
friendly with but a few fellows of tastes like his own. 
He had developed little of the social skill which marked 
him later ; he was thinking out the problems of the 
conduct of life, and of his art, literature. So seriously 

xxvii 



INTRODUCTION 

did he take the former that for a year after graduation he 
studied divinity. Several of his sermons have been saved, 
— compositions which afford glimpses of his courage and 
manliness, through an atmosphere of conventional and 
rather prosaic piety. It v^as fortunate for him that he 
abandoned this profession. Though undoubtedly his 
ethical enthusiasm would have found expression in it, 
his mind was both too pagan and too original to attain 
free play in any organization ; he was foreordained an 
intellectual free-lance. His next venture was more 
native. Becoming what he called a vagabond, he lived 
a free and outdoor life, a life of loving study of sky and 
forest as well as of books and men. That this life agreed 
with him we may assume from the appearance, in 1895, 
of his First Poems and Fragments, 

Yet the other side of his nature, what I may call the 
moral side, soon demanded that he again relate himself 
to society by some more recognized service than poetry. 
He set about discovering how he might earn bread with- 
out sacrificing that other intangible possession that we are 
told is equally necessary to life. He strove faithfully to 
combine bread-winning with ideal-winning, or, in the 
expressive commonplace, to *^ keep body and soul to- 
gether." He wished to be a worthy citizen of society, 
and yet he saw not how to be one without treason to his 
highest interests. It is a dilemma with which idealists 
are familiar. In all the rest of his life he was assaulting 
and reassaulting it, using against it all the ingenuity and 
courage and patience and hope he had, and leaving it 
unsolved when he died. 

In '9 5-^96 he was an assistant instructor in English 
at Harvard, carrying on at the same time graduate 

xxviii 



INTRODUCTION 

courses in composition and literature. The next year 
he was about to accept a similar post at the Institute of 
Technology, when he was offered the position of Secre- 
tary to the Librarian of the Boston Public Library. 
This he accepted, and held until his death three years 
later, working to such good effect that in 1899 he was 
made Clerk of the Corporation, and still managing in 
spare hours to produce the small but perfect book, the 
Paems of 1898. On the last day of May, 1899, he 
was suddenly taken with appendicitis, and after an illness 
of less than a week, died on June 4th, at the Massachu- 
setts General Hospital. 

It is easy enough to point out the disadvantageous 
effect of Savage's quicksilver-like mobility upon his life. 
He was not safeguarded by the usual Hmitations of interest 
from dissipating his energies. He cared so deeply for 
so many things that it was difficult for him to concentrate 
his forces on one undertaking. He read very widely, 
and blamed himself that he did not go even farther 
afield. All sorts of life appealed to him. At heart he 
desired, I think, to be at once a poet, a man of action, 
an athlete, a philosopher, a man of the world or of 
society, and a solitary thinker. He never brought him- 
self to sacrifice all activities but one. Yet, although 
success is difficult to him who will not accept such a 
sacrifice, the very sensitiveness of enthusiasm that made 
Savage unable to give up anything is itself noble. It is 
his strength as well as his weakness. Without it 
he might have accomplished more ; it is questionable 
whether he would have been as much. 

If Savage's note-books and the events of his life show 
thus clearly the impressibility and the' habit of self- 

xxix 



INTRODUCTION 

consideration that combined to make him eclectic, his 
poetical work is a third and even more striking testi- 
mony. The astonishing improvement found on com- 
paring his first with his second volume was the fruit of 
conscious effort. It proceeded from a ceaseless exercise 
of taste, which is a faculty dependent on permeability to 
impressions and the habit of reflecting upon them. It is 
interesting to find Savage, while still in college, discover- 
ing for himself, and writing to his younger sister, that 
'' what is true and beautiful is absolute ; and what is 
stupendous *and gorgeous and impressive and wonderful 
is inferior to it." It is interesting to find him awaking 
to the error of his first conceptions of literary art, and 
feeling out, at first helplessly, for sounder methods. In 
the autumn of 1895 he writes to a friend : 

**Dear : I am the most unhappy man of men ! 

Because I see, though this only now and again, how hope- 
lessly weak was my ancient theory, that genius might be 
left to train itself, that original power in a man could 
express itself without education. You know that I practi- 
cally believed that. 

'^ To-day I am taking English 5, 2, and Anglo-Saxon 
in Cambridge, and marking special reports in English 9. 
My realest reason for going back was because I wanted 

to take some strong medicine, to take 's censures 

with my eyes open, and find if I could not come out 
from under the cloud. 

^^ Do you know what I mean by 'cloud' ? I feel 
sometimes as though it were choking me, — I see other 
men in full career, coherent, strong, fluent, their power 
of expression running even with their conception — 

XXX 



INTRODUCTION 

while I labor and fail. The paltry inspiration that is in 
some of the First Poems does not comfort me. Where 
are power and beauty ? Where, indeed, are simple 
purity and grace ? Why, I hate most of those pieces ! 
And yet I cannot see beyond them, nor take any clear 
step onward. I feel (again) like a man in the jungle ; the 
ground under foot is a tangle of grass, the way ahead 
a tangle of vine and branch, the sky overhead obscured 
by the closely set tops of trees. I thought to fly over it 
all ; to-day I must cut my way, and I have only a poor 
pen-knife ! This is sincere, I do not anticipate any denial 
on your part, nor crave it. If I learn wisdom as the 
year goes by, I '11 write it out and send you." 

We know from his later work that Savage did in 
time learn wisdom, did find ^^ simple purity and grace," 
but it was only by indefatigable application of his native 
taste. It will be interesting to analyze his progress in 
some little detail. 

The evolution in his work is of two kinds : the ad- 
vance in style from diffuse prosaicism to crystalline 
compactness, and the advance in thought from traditional 
theology to the independence and originality and courage 
of such pieces as '^Believe in me" and ^' God, Thou 
art Good." The advance in style, in a sense the more 
important, since he was a lyrist rather than a thinker, 
he made by applying to everything he wrote his naturally 
keen sense for diction. How delicate and ardent was 
his love for words ! He notes in his journal Thoreau's 
passion for the crystalline words in the language, such as 
^* serene " and *^ ethereal " ; it was a passion he shared. 
One summer he ransacked the first letters of the diction- 

xxxi 



INTRODUCTION 

ary, growing as enthusiastic as a child with a new toy 
at the discovery of such words as ** azure," *' alert," 
*^ aura," *^ ashen." When a friend sent him a sprig 
of everlasting, with a comment on the dignity of the 
words *^ everlasting " and ^^ morning," he wrote a new 
stanza for his poem Processional in order to introduce 
them. A sentence in his note-book suggests the source 
of many of his own finest effects : *' The gracious 
quality of beauty comes like a bloom on words simple 
and specific." As time went on, he adopted a more 
and more laborious mode of composition, bringing a 
rigorous self-criticism to bear upon his originally keen 
instincts. His later note-books are webbed and net- 
worked with revisions and variants. It is surprising to 
see him developing one of his perfect couplets out of a 
weak, commonplace germ. Two examples must suffice. 
The last couplet of March 20, 

*^ Praise God I see them and can say, 
Another year, another day ! " 

was at first 

<« And I some little time will stay 
And mark them as I do to-day." 

And from the comically prosaic lines 

" Thus covertly, and day by day, 

My hours advance, my hair turns gray," 

grew the plain and noble couplet in the last stanza of 

Fagots y 

*«Thus covertly, and term by term, 
Like as the year, I grow infirm." 
xxxii 



INTRODUCTION 

By such means, testing and rejecting and deliberating 
and revising, he gave his verse its fine compression, its 
elegance of phrase, its harmony of tone and symmetry of 
proportion. 

Equally great, though less noticeable, was the advance 
he achieved in thought. Very open and fearless must 
be the mind which can in a few years think itself out of 
a stereotyped conventionality in belief and a shy isola- 
tion in action, into an independent, humane philosophy, 
and a gracious, cordial intercourse with men. Savage's 
invaluable habit of getting face to face with his impres- 
sions and interrogating them with unprejudiced curiosity 
vitalized his entire intellectual life, and disentangled him 
from tradition, to found him firmly upon truth. But 
further insistence on a fact so obvious is unnecessary. 
No reader can doubt Savage's originality, his mental 
self-dependence. What might be doubted by some is 
the efficacy of his beliefs, their fundamental worth for 
the purposes of life. Many people are fond of saying 
that all the results of a young man's untrammelled think- 
ing are ^^very pretty, but unpractical," meaning useless 
in the stress of experience. Such thinking, they affirm, 
leads to opinions charming enough as conversational and 
literary ornaments, but hollow and brittle for any ulti- 
mate uses of the spirit. Savage's did not prove so. 
When he came to his early death, and it was necessary 
to leave his unfinished work and the fi-iends he loved, he 
found his truth still true, and could reconcile death with 
the philosophy life had given him. 

If we can fix our eyes, not on his fragmentary doings 
and his imperfect work, in which he shares the lot of 
all, and on his untimely death, which has the look of a 
^ xxxiii 



^ 



INTRODUCTION 

peculiarly cruel and empty fatality, but rather on his 
steady allegiance to ideal aims, on the quenchless courage 
with which he lived and died, we shall feel that he 
achieved his end after all, and that he does not so much 
need our pity as command our gratitude. For he was 
one of the faithful. He labored without misgiving, and 
when he had to die laid down his life with the same 
spirit of trust that had been his strength in meeting it. 
His friends, and those who can divine what he was, 
will in their thought of him quickly come to forget the 
incompleteness of his life and the insufficieney of his ex- 
pression, and remember only that he is one of that great 
company whose faith and faithfulness have served the 
ideal. 

D. G. M. 
Boston, November, 1900. 



xxxiv 



FIRST POEMS Cif FRAGMENTS 

1 

A. D. MDCCCXCV 



^ 



TO GERTRUDE SAVAGE 

A nvinding ijoater omjuardfloivSy 
And njuhither, only ocean kno^ws -, 
Happy the crystal source that lies 
Reflecting in its heart the skies. 



APOLOGY 

BE more concrete, immediate to man ! 
So did he counsel me, the sage; and I, 
Taking for naught the gentle guidances 
Of nature, who in all my life before 
Had lived unconscious, leaving much to her, 
I cast her out; so I forgot the sky 
And turned my eyes into the heart of man. 
But poetry is a swift, unconscious growth. 
Springs native where it may, and ever lives 
The child of impulse unaware and wild; 
And passion many times must rise and fall 
And much of life be lived before the word 
Spring up to utterance and demand a birth. 
So was I barren many days and so 
I doubted him, the sage and moralist ; 
Therefore at last I claimed again the days 
When I was not so much and nature more. 
When beauty rose, if beauty it were, and clothed 
A happy impulse or a strong desire 
In forms and colors native to the time. 



SHORTER POEMS 
I -XXVIII 



I 



'^TT^ IS grace to sing to nature, and to pray 
A The God of nature, out of His large heart. 

To grant us knowledge of His human way; 
This is the whole of nature and of art. 



II 



EVEN in the city, I 
Am ever conscious of the sky; 
A portion of its frame no less 
Than in the open wilderness. 
The stars are in my heart by night; 
I sing beneath the opening light, 
As envious of the bird ; I live 
Upon the pavement, yet I give 
My soul to every growing tree 
That in the narrow ways I see. 
My heart is in the blade of grass 
Within the courtyard where I pass ; 
And the small, half-discovered cloud 
Compels me till I cry aloud. 
I am the wind that beats the walls 
And wanders trembling till it falls ; 
The snow, the summer rain am I, 
In close communion with the sky. 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



III 

WHEN I look on Ossipee 
Not the hill alone I see ; 
Not the hill I see to-day 
Fair and large and distant gray, 
But a mountain richly bright, 
Shining with eternal light. 
Fashioned in a fearful past, 
Born to be while life shall last, 
Yet I fear thee not, but know 
Thou shalt ever with me go. 
I shall see thee, I shall find 
The vision ever in the mind. 
Given to me one happy hour 
And received by me in power; 
I shall never know the day 
When thy touch has passed away; 
For thy spirit, Ossipee, 
Has become a part of me. 

IV 

UPON a pasture hill a pine-tree stands 
And in the air holds up its slender hands; 
A double sheep-track turns beneath the tree, 
Dips to the firs, and seeks the meadow lands. 

4 



SHORTER POEMS 



The sun is setting ; slowly, one by one, 
Faint breaths of wind along the branches run; 

The quiet of the hills is on the air 
And on the earth beneath a quiet sun. 

In contrast with the sky a gray stone wall 
Is black beneath the orange light ; and all 

The earth is black ; never so black the earth 
As underneath a sunset sky in fall. 

The pine-tree's plumy branches make a net 
And hold the light of heaven ; and nearer yet, 

Cold in the unfeatured blackness of the ground, 
Up-springs a ray from some hid rivulet. 

Deep in the pasture hummocks at my feet ; 
I hear its icy ripple, low and sweet; 

No other sound ; but in the air, unheard, 
I hear the pulse of winter coldly beat. 



WHAT know I of the fields of fall. 
The autumn days beyond the town ? 
I do not hear the harvest-call, 
I do not see the pastures brown ; 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



The upland sloping to the down, 
With corn-shocks leaning on the wall ; 
And golden ground-fruit shining through it all 

They tell me of the violet 

Upon the hill, bare at the crest; 
Of the autumnal primrose set 

Deep where the banks protect it best ; 

Of summer fallow fields now drest 
In green ; of meadows deep and wet ; 
Ah ! I have seen and I shall not forget ! 

Where stubble-fields give way to fern 
In meadows where the water lies, 

I Ve seen the sharp-flamed sumac burn 
And flash its fires before my eyes. 
Faint pictures of the river rise 

With blowing mist beyond the turn ; 

Of lean November forests bare and stern. 

I once have seen; and all the kind 
Stood round me in that happy year ; 

In one "bright impulse of the mind 
I was the centre of the sphere; 
The spring and summer centred here 

On autumn; winter stood behind 

And beckoned, whispering in the smoky wind. 

6 



SHORTER POEMS 



VI 



THE sea is silent round this rocky shore; 
The forest wind 

From the loud level beach behind 
Brings rolling up the distant water's roar. 

Silent the wheeling sea-gull in the air, 

Without a cry ; 

Far off beneath the bending sky 
A silent ship goes down the ocean stair. 

The sea Is blue, the sky is white with cloud, 

The land is white ; 

The seaward rocks are shining bright. 
Enwrapped in a white, salt, and icy shroud. 

The weeds and bushes bare above the snow. 

Against the sun 

Hold up brave stems, and many a one 
Has February bits of bud to show. 

Where roses grew in one wild garden-close 

I pulled away 

A pair of rose-hips for to-day ; 
Memorial to the mistress of the rose. 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



VII 

WHEN February sun shines cold 
There comes a day when in the air 
The wings of winter slow unfold 

And show the golden summer there. 

Dead ivy on the winter wall 
Is glowing with an April light 5 

And all the wreckage of the fall 
Above the snow comes into sight. 

By a green rock beneath the pines 
Are shadows blue along the snow. 

Above the silent sun the lines 
Of cloud in white procession go. 

A bloom is on the forest tops 

Of red light bursting through the brown. 
The ice awakes, and silver drops 

Come through the meadow stealing down, 

The sky is hushed ; beneath the trees 
Where silentness and night have birth, 

I heard the sunset whisper, Peace ! 

Peace, Peace ! the gods are on the earth. 



8 



SHORTER POEMS 



VIII 



STILL, in the meadow by the brook I lay 
And felt the April creep along my streams, 
Subdue my currents to herself and play 

At hide-and-seek with winter in my dreams. 

Rich in the summer day the time is rife 
With all an eager fancy will contrive ; 

But April welcomes each new shock of life 
The sluggard winter from the heart to drive. 

Thus did I tremble at the passing bird, 

Leaped in the sun and with the breezes ran, 

My heart a brook, and all my life a word 
To tell how near to nature is a man. 



IX 

IN the first pale flush of even 
When the sun is hardly down, 
Ere the stars are in the heaven. 
Ere the shadows turn to brown; 

When the eastern sky is darkened 
And the zenith still is blue. 



9 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 

I have stood and dimly hearkened 
To the falling of the dew. 

I have stood within the hollow 
By low, rolling hummocks made, 

Close beside a sloping fallow 
In the bottom of a glade. 

While the west was slowly dying ; 

And the dark east followed fast, 
Swarming over, swiftly flying 

Till the world was overcast. 

Downward, past the dim horizon 
Till the valley filled with night. 

And the cool earth-whisper rising, 
Filled me with a wild delight! 

Let the day go by to even. 

Hark ! the distant vespers' toll. 
When the sun is set in heaven 

It is sunrise in the soul. 



X 

WHEN evening comes and shadows gray 
Steal out across the glimmering bay 
And tremble in the air between j 
10 



SHORTER POEMS 

When evening comes and shadows green 
Are shaken down across the moor 
From willow-trees along the shore ; 

When evening stoops across the hill 
Towards the sunset glowing still 
And fills the hollow glens with shade; 

When evening gathers in the glade ; 
And all the little beasts now run 
That erst were hidden from the sun ; 

Then do I hear the footsteps fall 
That bitter day hears not at all ; 
Then is the sunset like a door 
That leads me on to more and more, 
Till in the quietness of night 
I find a freedom and a light 
Eternal such as nowhere glows 
From any sun that ever rose. 

XI 

WITH all the soul within me and suppressed 
Before the sunset, heard I, and confessed, 
A breath of God from out the whispered hand 
Held o'er the lips of the great speaking west. 

II 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



Heard it, and all the soul within me burned ! 
Heard it, and wondered at the secret learned ; 

And all the busy accidents of life 
O'erwhelmed it then ; it never has returned. 

Thus once the doors of heaven wide open stand ; 
The voice is heard, of promise or command ; 

Is seen the gleam ; and then the portals close 
And nature grows again upon the land. 



XII 



I LOVE to walk against the yellow light. 
The lemon-yellow of the first daylight, 
When cold and clear above the frozen earth 
The white sun rises far down to the right. 

And then to think of life is very sweet ; 
The shackles fall and drop about one's feet ; 

Till in the clear forgetfulness of morn 
It seems the world and life are all complete. 



12 



SHORTER POEMS 

'T is good to be forgotten and forget ; 
To look upon the sun and so beget 

A golden present, and a past that 's free, 
A little time, of memory and regret. 

And when one strikes and stumbles on a stone, 
And turns to find the winged fancies flown — 

Yet through the passages of life that day 
Will run a radiance other than its own. 

XIII 

THE flash of sunlight from a bit of glass 
Has often power to stop me as I pass ; 
And when I turn into the burning west 
I fling me down upon the sunny grass, 

Silent. I tell not all the little things 
That fly to me and give my spirit wings; 

The black-eyed bird, the cloud, the silver leaf, 
The valley wind that passes as it sings. 

And when the sun descending from the height. 
Seeks in the sunken west the bath of night. 

Wrapped in the darkling mantle of the sky 
I wander forth and seek a new delight. 



13 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 

XIV 

THE influences of air and sky- 
Are side lights from the eternal throne 
That fall upon the watchful eye 
Of him who silent waits, alone, 
And crown him master of his own. 
He knows the beauty of the rose; 
The central sun, the farthest star he knows. 

The balance of a blade of grass. 

The winds that in the meadows run, 

Gathering incense as they pass 
To offer to the throned sun; 
The trembling secret to be won 

From every running stream ; all these 

Are his, yet force him, silent, to his knees. 

The watcher shall possess the earth 
In silence, leaping to control 

In moments mighty with the birth 
Of passion, when the eternal soul 
Shall wholly bind him to the whole. 

The air, the sky, the winds, the rose. 

Are his; the earth, and God Himself he knows. 

To H. F. L. 



14 



SHORTER POEMS 



XV 



A LARK flew by upon the air 
And struck a red leaf from the tree, 
There where he lighted; and a pair 
Of robins bore him company. 
And I, I looked across the lea. 
Across the autumn uplands bare, 
Then turned again and saw him sitting there. 

Thy life is mine, thou meadow-lark ; 
Within thy golden breast I feel 

My own heart beating, and I hark 
And hear thy voice upon me steal. 
Winning my own; and past repeal 

I give myself to thee and mark 

These few words here upon this maple's bark ; 

That " I am Thou and Thou art I; " 
Cutting it deep that it may show 

To future years ; and, by and by. 
When, as the tree shall lofty grow, 
The woodman comes to lay it low. 

This word shall stand befpre his eye. 

That " I am Thou," writ clear, " and Thou art I.' 



15 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



XVI 

THIS is thy brother, this poor silver fish, 
Close to the surface, dying in his dish ; 
Thy flesh, thy beating heart, thy very life ; 
All this, I say, art thou, against thy wish. 

Thou mayst not turn away, thou shalt allow 
The truth, nor shalt thou dare to question how : 
There is but one great heart in nature beating. 
And this is thy heart, this, I say, art thou. 

In all thy power and all thy pettiness. 
With this and that poor selfish purpose, this 
And that high-climbing fancy, and a heart 
Caught into heaven or cast in the abyss. 

Thou art the same with all the little earth, 
A little part ; and sympathy of birth 

Shall tell thee, and thine openness of soul, 
What fear is death and what a life is worth. 



i6 



SHORTER POEMS 



XVII 



FAR in the south the redwings hear and speed 
To answer nature's far-heard northern cry ; 
Swift from the fields they gather and take on 
The burden of a journey ; young and old 
Swing upward to the sun as if the need 
Of earth and of her comfort were gone by. 
And guided by the star of memory run 
Upon the trembling air ; if, losing hold. 
With weary wing one settle to the land ; 
If, sideways glancing from the flight, one see 
A fairer light than hope, or faltering 
Another answer to the white command 
Hurled upward from the gun : yet joyfully 
The happy flight speeds onward with the spring. 

XVIII 

THOU little god within the brook 
That dwellest, friend of man, 
I oft have heard the simple prayer 
Thou tellest unto Pan : 

That he who comes with rod and line 

And robs thy life to-day. 
May yet by the great god be taught 

To come some other way. 

2 17 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



XIX 

WHERE man has conquered nature dies; 
We shift some slender-growing pine 
From out her own familiar skies 

Where-under forests fall and rise, 

To pots and gardens, then repine 
That where man conquers nature dies. 

The atmosphere that round her lies 

Bears not the light that used to shine 
From out her own familiar skies, 

She is a stranger. So our eyes 

Run o'er the world and seek a sign ! 
If where man conquers nature dies 

What is our earthly paradise ? 

Will nature there withhold the wine 
That from her own familiar skies 

She used to pour ? Do we devise 

A garden earth and say, in fine, 
Where man has conquered nature dies 
From out her own familiar skies ? 



i8 



SHORTER POEiMS 



XX 

THE breath of slowly-moving spring 
Stirs the light leaf, the doubtful wing, 
And tempers each created thing. 

The tumult of the summer's life 
Surrounds the earth and, rich and rife, 
Finds outlet in a world of strife. 

The autumn season stills the plain, 
Quiets the river, sifts the grain, 
And looks to rest and sleep again. 

In winter does great nature rest 

Or die, dismissing every guest 

And closing up the broad earth's breast. 

XXI 

"OOMETHING in the sense of morning 

O Lifts the heart up to the sun." 
In our youth we may be pagan, 
God is many, and the One 
Great Supreme will wait till evening 
When our little day is done : 
Something in the sense of morning 
Lifts the heart up to the sun ! 

19 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



XXII 

THE road ran sloping through the trees 
Below the dusty hill ; 
The sun, swept inward by the breeze, 
Lightened the running rill. 

Maples and chestnuts stood along 

And autumn, at the prime. 
Strewed nuts and leafage that belong 

To this September time. 

One tree was green beside the way, 
A small white pine, I thought ; 

And there a broken branch and gray 
Within a fork had caught. 

It showed unlovely on the tree 

As dark and dead it lay; 
" And in my spleen I smiled " to see 

That symbol of decay. 

But my companion did not show 

Such sympathy as mine ! 
He mounted up the tree, to throw 

Its burden from the pine. 



20 



SHORTER POEMS 



I cried, "Why will you not believe 

That nature's ways suffice 
To nature's purposes and leave 

Her to her own device ? 

" She knows her purpose for the pine 

And does not need the aid 
Of wisdom such as yours and mine 

In plans which she has made." 

He cast it down and answered, " Why, 

Ev'n as I am a man. 
In doing this, believe me, I 

Am part of nature's plan ! " 

I smiled again but not in joy, 

In fear ; for where it lay. 
The branches covered, to destroy, 

A purple aster spray ! 

My friend was pleased ; not he divined 
That though he was a man. 

To be content we must be blind ; 
For such is nature's plan. 



21 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



XXIII 

I STOOD at the hedge as a hearse went by 
And passed me along the way; 
The sun broke in through a silver sky 
And scattered a golden ray. 

Should I offer a prayer for the passing dead. 

For the hearts going burdened by; 
With a human pity, a catholic dread 

Of the tear, the sorrow, and sigh ? 

I too knew grief and the burdened heart. 
Some knowledge of pain was mine ; 

Should I bow my head for another's smart. 
Should I make this simple sign ? 

So I wondered and thought as the hearse went by 

With its poor dead corpse within ; 
But I turned aside to the opening sky — 

" Such a feeling may once have been, 

" But now " — for the impulse was gone, you see. 

And death was no longer new ; 
" Like a fallen leaf from an autumn tree 

He is dead ; what is else to do ? " 



22 



SHORTER POEMS 



And there on the path as I turned around, 

By the side of a thorn-tree root 
An earthworm lay, crushed into the ground 

By the heel of a passing boot. 

Well, death and death ; 't is an equal term. 

For the worm and the man to-day ; 
But I turned and buried the angle-worm 

In a neighboring lump of clay. 

XXIV 

THE scream of the tern in the roar of the 
waters 
Will sound when the tumult of nature is o'er ; 
When the garden of earth is a home for the 
daughters 
Of Eve, and when Pan is remembered no more. 

White-winged, he appears ! Dark, erratic, uneven, 
A figure on earth of the stars in the sky ; 

Of high disarray and disorder in heaven. 

Where the Galaxy strikes with dismay on the 
eye! 



23 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 

Where freak and caprice build a wild conflagration, 
Where Chaos is king over torrents of stars ; 

Who scatters the earth in a blind indignation, 
And systems are sped in interminate wars. 

Then the children of Pan in that day will come 
singing, 

In fierceness, of him who has set in the spheres 
Dismay ; and along the salt sea-limits ringing. 

The scream of the tern striking wild on their ears. 

XXV 

LIKE a dead leaf that rolls along the ground, 
Driven by a wind that wanders round and round, 
I see my heart, with edges cut and curled. 
Like a dead leaf that 's driven without a sound. 

Green faded into red, and red to brown ; 
Life to decay, and death the latest crown ! 

So is my life, and lacks the heart of power 
Here to lift up the god that *s fallen down. 

Alas ! why, in the days of mighty Jah, 
Did I pull down thy pillars, Asherah ? 

Baal, where art thou ? Egypt, even thou 
Hadst faith for me beneath the wings of Ptah ! 

24 



SHORTER POEMS 



XXVI 



ADAM arose at the word of God, 
Up-borne on the bosom of all the earth ; 
Brother of trees and the black, prone sod ; 
The same in death and the same in birth. 

Is it divine, the mystery ? 

Is the whisper true of the hidden word 
That sounds for some in hill and sea, 

In the lapse of life when the deeps are heard ? 

The sunlight lifts in the soul of man 
The white-light torch of another dawn ; 

And love will finger a mystic span, 
When the chords are drawn. 



XXVII 

IN long, slow silences of soul 
Beneath the sunset on the sea 
I think I hear the numbers roll 
That tell my conquest over thee ; 

When thou art gentle and serene, 
Thyself, forgotten all thy pride ; 



25 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



And I, myself as I have been, 
A hero with his sword untried, 

Able for mastery ; and the game 
Is offered and the action up ; 

And to my purpose true I claim 

A hot draught from the stirrup-cup. 

Then entertain thee. All my soul 
Awakes upon the sunset sea 

When high and clear the numbers roll 
That tell my conquest over thee. 

XXVIII 

IF ever I have thought or said 
In all the seasons of the past 
One word at which thy heart has bled 
Believe me, it will be the last. 

The tides of life are deep and wide, 
The currents swift to bear apart 

E'en kindred ships ; but from thy side 
I pray my sail may never start. 

If, in the turning day and night 
Of this our earth, our little year, 
26 



SHORTER POEMS 



Thou shalt have lost me from thy sight 
Across the checkered spaces drear. 

Thy words are uttered ; and the mind 
Accustomed, cannot all forget ; 

While written in my heart I find 
An impulse that is deeper yet. 

We love but never know the things, 
To value them, that nearest stand. 

The heart that travels seaward brings 
The dearest treasure home to land. 

To M. J. S. 



27 



LONGER POEMS 
I -VII 



A NEW ENGLAND MOUNTAIN 

WESTMORELAND and the hills of Cum- 
berland, 
Though Alps may overpeer them, have a name 
Unperishing while the earth still bears in man 
The blossom of a high-aspiring mind ; 
For Wordsworth loved them. And the sacred 

poet 
Helvetia lacks not, nor old-age Japan, 
A poet whose song above the fields of tea. 
Above the temples to the figured god 
Ancient in beauty set against the ascent, 
Rises supreme to where above them all 
Uplifts a hollow summit white with snow 
Pale Fuji-san, and there in music builds 
A temple sheer in beauty to the sky ! 
No outland peaks I know ; but were I born 
Among the lakes, or in the fields of Kai 
No other were the song's essential heart 
Upon the mountains that I then should sing ; 
For once I saw a summit not so bright 
As these are fabled, mounting to the sky 
In scar and ice-clifF loftily supreme. 
But such a mountain as New England knows ; 
And never since in moments when the press 

31 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



Of life has lifted has the mountain's touch — 
Joy, merely joy and beauty, that is all, 
And passionate love and depth and mystery — 
Left me ! and thus I sing a native song. 
Content to be a brother to Japan, 
Cousin to Switzerland, believing true 
That ere he v^anders by Castalian springs 
The poet first must drink the wells of home. 



II 



NEAR THE WHITE LEDGE, 
SANDWICH, N. H. 

I FOLLOWED up a little burn. 
Led onward by the smell of fern ; 
And standing at the opening day 
Where yellow blossoms line the way 
I catch, blown faintly on the air. 
The whispered perfume of the rare. 
Pale morning-primrose^ wet and fair ! 
The bobolink stands on the grass 
Now ere the deep July shall pass 
And greets me from the bennets tall ; 
I hear a distant thrush's call 
Rise full and deep, then silent fall. 

32 



LONGER POEMS 



Spirit of Wordsworth, with me still 

Upon the plain, upon the hill, 

I find my purpose wholly bent 

To be to-day thine instrument ; 

Led upward to the thought of thee 

By all the spreading world I see. 

The broad lake country at my feet 

Bids Asquam with Wynander greet, 

Rydal with Ossipee ; and shows 

The Bearcamp water where it flows 

Another Rotha, stream and break. 

From covert pond to glittering lake ; 

While Grasmere lies serene and still 

By yonder tarn beneath Red Hill. 

Thy mountains, Wordsworth, too, are by 

And paint their shadows on the sky. 

Chocorua stands, but not alone. 

For out across the scene is thrown 

The memory of Helvellyn ; hid 

Within thy ifolds, Tripyramid, 

Are thoughts of Kirkstone, Fairfield, all 

That heard Joanna's laughing call ! 

Whiteface is vanished in the shade 

By Scawfell and Blencathra made ; 

While Sandwich Mountain at the west. 

In Glaramara's shadow dressed. 

Leads the high path toward Campton ways 

3 33 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



Across a steeper Dunmail Raise ! 
Lake, hill, and mountain, all are bright 
With the first gift of morning light ; 
The sun is on them and the dew. 
Shining far down and glittering through 
The wide, white fields of mountain air 
High o'er the valleys everywhere. 
And Wordsworth, in the auxiliar flame 
That trembles on them from thy name 
They bear in all their company 
Aloft, the living thought of thee. 

The Quaker poet sang his song 

And loved the world these scenes among ; 

A sober man, a song, I think 

Not like the wanton bobolink ! 

It was an utterance sweet like those 

Light raptures of the song-sparrows ; 

It ne'er attained the impetuous rush 

And music of the full-voiced thrush ; 

Whose song, O Wordsworth, like to thine 

In joy long-thought and measured fine, 

Is priestly in the praise of Pan Divine. 



34 



LONGER POEMS 

III 
"I LEFT THE CITY'' 

I LEFT the city to the north and walked 
Against a southwest wind ; the hurtling rain 
Showered the empty streets in noisy gusts, 
Swept little footsteps down across the walls, 
And on the wind came tossing through the trees. 
The gusty city was not long to leave. 
And underneath the open heaven I found 
Breath and a beating wind, a hurrying sky 
Of gray cloud under white, a world of rain. 
And one long roadway southward under it, 
A causey on the marsh, where on the left 
A broad reach of the tide lay full, with salt 
Red grasses bounded. Swinging to the west 
The long, dark wind came streaming, while the rain 
Sloped with the wind and swept into my face ; 
And I rejoiced, exulted in my heart. 
Taking a grim delight as I suppressed 
Each motion that betrayed me to the rain. 
And drew my mantle closer. Rank on rank 
The rain came on ; the landscape, wetted o'er, 
Lay passive, bay and bogland, to the sky ; 
The wind beat hard, and I through a long hour 
Had stood rejoicing in the unwonted storm, 

35 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 

When two small figures hurrying through the rain 
Came down the pathway from the town ; they 

laughed, 
Two rascal boys set free from school and mother, 
And laid small schemes for catching smaller fish, 
Clambered across the roadway fence and followed 
Through the salt grasses to the reedy shore ; 
I saw them standing, careful of their lines 
And peering o'er the bankside, plotting deep 
With one desire in earnest in their minds 
And filling them; while I, the idler there. 
Leaned on the rail to watch them and the bay, 
Gave up the hope I harbored of the west 
And sunset, for the hour was drawing near. 
Content to take my pleasure in the rain. 
The sky had darkened in the hour and drew 
A cloak of gray cloud closer to the earth ; 
Sudden as half aware I watched the scene 
A sense of saiFron in the western sky 
Grew over me ; the heavens were lifted high 
And broke before my eyes ; along the west 
Great masses of the storm swept to the north. 
Went swarming eastward in the southern sky ; 
The evening earth grew black beneath the light 
That broke through western clouds, that caught 

the rain 
In brightness as it lay in shining pools, 

36 



LONGER POEMS 



And sprang from wet walls and from dripping roofs. 
There midst the white light and the golden edges 
Of happy clouds just opening to the earth, 
Bluer than painted blue was ever painted, 
I saw the sky and prayed — prayed ? prayed to 

whom ? 
God, God ! I cried, but what I meant I knew not. 
This was the perfect beauty, this was joy 
Supreme, redundant ; ah ! no longer men 
Seek heaven in Beatrice ; this was heaven displayed 
To the broad, fertile earth and yet I prayed not. 
'T was like a gray thought broken by the wind 
Of promise and the sun's fulfilment ; scattered 
To north and south, with routed columns flying. 
Majestic rain in grand procession moved 
Across the saffron fading western sky. 
Cloud upon massive cloud-shape trailing low 
Over the sunset earth ; while in my eyes 
I caught the cool, white, crystal light of heaven 
That glistens after rain, and that one grace 
Supreme that God has granted pagan man, 
The bright blue sky. 



37 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 

IV 
THE SONG-SPARROW 

AT rest upon some quiet limb 
And singing to his pretty " marrow," 
Sweet-breasted friend of child and man, 
I love the bright eyes and the tan. 
Gray-mottled coat that suits the trim 
And winsome singing-sparrow. 

He seeks no dear and lofty ground ; 
His home is every ridge and furrow; 
In the low alder bushes he 's 
At home, and in the wayside trees ; 
Wherever man lives I have found 
The nest of the song-sparrow. 

Except among the chimney-tops 

A-smoking where the streets are narrow ; 
Where man has banished living green 
And scarce a blade of grass is seen 
He rarely comes, he never stops. 
The little rustic sparrow. 

Where twigs are small and branches low 
And scarce the name of woods can borrow, 

38 



LONGER POEMS 



He flits and sings the whole day long 

And " Rivers run," is still his song, 
" And flowers blossom, breezes blow, 
And all for the song-sparrow ! " 

I meet him in the tufted field 

Among the clover-tops and yarrow ; 
I hear him by the quiet brook, 
And always with the open look 
Of one who would not be concealed ; 
And then I meet the sparrow 

When golden lights at evening run 

Among the trees the copses thorough ; 
And there I catch his joyous song. 
Stealing the moments that belong 
To songsters of the setting sun 
And not to the song-sparrow. 

When touches of the coming night 
Set free the bands of hidden sorrow 

The night-bird sounds his ringing note. 
And from his melancholy throat 
The hermit pours a sad delight, 
And no one hears the sparrow. 

His song is tuned for his to-day, 

With hope and promise for the morrow ; 

39 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 

More lofty notes are upward sent, 
But none more simple and content, 
None cheerfuller in work and play 
. Than that of the song-sparrow. 



IN CHERRY LANE 

A LITTLE maiden, in her hand 
A pitcher, on her head a band 
Of yellow cloth ; her neck was bare. 
The kerchief fluttered in the air ; 
The loose-stuff gown all straitly hung 
And as she went about her clung ; 
Her bosom showed beneath the dress 
Young and unconscious, and a tress 
Now here, now there, crept out beneath 
The band, as from the opening sheath 
The tasselled spring ; a slender maid. 
She walked in childhood unafraid. 

That such a slip of womanhood 
Should blossom in a lane so rude. 
That one in that low, sodden place 
Should smile with such a winning grace 



40 



LONGER POEMS 



A marvel is unto the last ! 
I seemed to see, even as she passed 
The summer following on the spring ; 
Hot, fetid days that ever bring 
The noisome vapors up about 
The meadow blossom in a rout ; 
Till in the passing of the days 
The stem was bent, the shining face 
Stooped down and met the marshy soil 
And soon was gone. But in my heart 
Even at the fancy I recoil ; 
I will not give her such a part. 
Her eye was bright, her step was free. 
And as I looked I seemed to see 
The quick blood flow, the softer skin 
Below the throat, beneath the chin. 
The quick, young beating of the heart, 
And on her face the blushes start ! 
Even as she came so let her go. 
Whither or whence I cannot know. 
I only know if in that lane 
I ever chance to pass again, 
The memory of that maiden fair 
Will lend a fragrance to the air 
And make the place, not over sweet, 
Not wholly evil to my feet. 



T 



41 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 

VI 
WOODSTOCK 

THIS, Woodstock, is my gift; and if I give 
So much as this of all thou gavest me, 
Call me not selfish if I have forgot 
Thy daily life. 

THE STREAMS 

OFT have my footsteps in the past been turned, 
Woodstock, to seek in solitude the Hfe 
That flows within thy brotherhood of streams ; 
In Moosilauke the slender, in the blue 
Pemigewasset, and the silver East. 
Now once again — and in what other scenes ! — 
Thy voices come to me, thy life, across 
The silver indistinctness of a year ; 
And first, O Moosilauke, I turn to thee. 
Born of the mighty mountain and its caves 
Dark, and its forests and its long ravines. 
A multitude of slender waters run 
From off the sloping hills, from beds of moss 
Beneath a hundred oaks, from little stones 
Tumbled along before thy April strength, 

42 



LONGER POEMS 



Now lying quiet, making thee a bed ; 

From sandy sources in the tufted fields 

Where cattle browse, and from a thousand springs 

Where I was never led thy waters come, 

Thy blue and silver slender stream. The sky 

Bends over thee more closely, and there falls 

A richer gift of azure through the trees 

Upon thy waters, making thee a brook 

Of blue and silver, Moosilauke ; and thou, 

Fulfilled of beauty in thyself and round 

Encompassed all about with loveliness, 

Art richer than thy brothers in the gift 

Of quietness and tender solitude ; 

Friend of the green upon thy banks, thou 'rt loved 

More dearly by the white and purple flowers, 

More dearly loved if loving be the act 

Of neighborhood and presence ; and as I 

Do love the neighborhood of green and blue. 

The forest and the sky ; the silver love 

That glistens in the stream, and that low light 

That passes from the faces of the flowers ; 

So by this promise and confession I 

Do love thee, Moosilauke, 

And thee I love. 
Pure in thy beauty, perfect in thy strength, 
Pemigewasset, lying in thy source 
Beneath the brow of the great Profile ! Far 

43 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 

Above thee is the stern, sad Mountain King, 
Him with the mighty message that no man 
Can wholly hear : the sternness and the sadness 
Of nature conscious of herself, or man 
Conscious of nature, ignorant of God. 
This is the burden of that noble brow ; 
And thou to me didst give along thy way 
Suggestions of this message till below. 
Surrounded by the world, thou dost forget 
Thy birth and I with thee forgot. One day 
I wandered from thy course beside a run 
Of darker waters ; turning from the track 
Of wheels and from the multitude of men 
Along thy fertile way, to seek thy stream. 
Thou dark-veined Bogan, tributary brook. 
Thy waters run and bear a deeper song 
Soft on the moss, and in my heart I love 
The memory of that hour wherein I stayed 
My life a little while with thee ; my heart 
Was opened to thee in a deep unrest. 
And to the motion of thy currents all 
My thoughts ran freely ; 't was a joy to hear, 
'T was rest and satisfaction to behold 
Thy voice and colors and thy forms ; I took 
A comfort in thy presence, tuned to hear 
A voice in thee repeated from my own 
And yet not wholly mine ; but more, to live 

44 



LONGER POEMS 

And run harmonious with my hand in thine, 

And in the gentle beating of thy life 

Find my own poise and balance ; wrapt about 

As in a mist of music and led on 

To live and feel as prodigal as thou, 

Careless of all degrees. 

And now with strength and joy I turn to thee 
Thundering in thy caverns, noble East, 
Born of the midmost of the mountains, child 
More truly than the Saco of the heart 
And spirit of the hills. The powers prevail 
Through all the mountains that shall give thee life ; 
Thy birth is now upon a thousand peaks 
And has been and shall be ; thou art a giant. 
Impatient of the earth that holds thee, wild ! 
And thus thy voice is stranger to me, thus 
It sounds a note I cannot always hear. 
Not in all moods ; but sometimes, low at first, 
Above the unsensed tumult of the world 
I hear the rushing of thy waters, catch 
The silver flash of sunlight from thy rocks. 
Then in my heart feel thy great spirit moving. 
Thou art the friend, not of the earth — the rocks 
Surround thee and control thy dreadful course — 
But of the mountain winds; the winds pass o'er thee 
And catch thy motion and thy eager voice ; 

45 



FIRST POEMS & FRAGMENTS 

Thus tempered they pass onward and below 

They whisper to the listening ear of man. 

Or in thy solitudes perchance he hears 

A choral voice, thy music and the wind, 

Joined always, breathing to the same intent, 

A brother voice, an echo of his own. 

There if he listen, down below the sound 

He hears the voice articulate of life 

Made manifest his own ; he hears his voice 

Dim-speaking to him through the gulf of change ; 

Another form, a myriad others, but 

Ever his own beseeching to be heard 

In sympathy. Wise in my purpose I, 

Nor I alone give, noble East, to thee 

My hand ; for thou art brother to the wind. 

And savage as thou art, child of the peaks. 

Clad white in rocks and thine own silver form. 

Thou dost not find thy rest upon the earth 

But goest dissatisfied unto the sea 

Where thou again art wild. 

To J. T. S. 



46 



LONGER POEMS 



THE HEDGEROW 

THE sun is up, Great God, the sun is up, 
High o'er the eastern hill among white clouds 
Insufferable ! I thank Thee for the call. 
Deep in the Woodstock meadows on a morn 
Pleasant it is to wander ere the sun 
Has burned the dewdrops off the bending grass ; 
When each small area seems a world complete, 
When every forest stem beneath the sun 
Shoots out a light, and every meadow span 
Is dowered with moving radiance ; and the hills ! 
I had not known their power till I had seen. 
Limned by the early morn, their mystic heads 
White in the eastern circuit. From the town 
The path led out across the dew-wet lands. 
Crossed the cold river in the river-mist. 
And turned aside before the columned elms. 
Heavy with morning light ; three things remain 
In joy, of all the pleasant things I saw 
Along this early path : the glowing elms. 
Far off, the line of hills, and suddenly 
(That rose abrupt and claimed its character) 
A straight and tangled row of heavy green, 
A hedge, till then unguessed, where loftier trees 
Stood up amid a world of clustering things. 
Brambles and slender vines and, stiffly held, 

47 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



The heads of little, sturdy, hopeful trees. 

Along one maple branch some colder wisp 

Of passing wind had struck an early blow 

And pressed the green life back ; the kindlier airs 

Had after gathered round and now caressed 

The broken hope into a golden death. 

This was a passing fancy, but the elms 

Are living elms and must forever live, 

Rich in the willing burden of that morn ; 

I never see beneath the golden mist 

Of peaceful afternoon, or in the time 

Of open daylight such an upland slope 

Without the gentle coming of this one, 

This morning picture and the further thought 

Of all the hidden chambers whence are drawn 

The veils, lights, shadows, colors of the world 

That spread across the poorest piece of ground 

To form and to transform ; then at the last 

I saw the tangled hedgerow by the wall, 

My mind woke to a fancy and at once 

I found it wandering over English fields 

And lodging with the primrose and the lark ; 

For here there was a hedge ! The pioneer 

Had built his roadside wall of labored stone, 

And through his fields had led this simple line 

Rough-set of rounded rock, to part his herd 

Of cattle and his flock (perhaps) of sheep, 

48 



LONGER POEMS 



What time they browsed in Woodstock. Early 

grass 
Had pushed a carpet in among the stones 
And here the scythe had stopped ; chance-drifted 

dust, 
Holding the promise and the hope of life, 
Seeds, the small looms of nature's garment, here 
Found an untroubled resting-place and ran 
Through all their changes. Years passed by and 

here 
The squirrel found a harbor and a home ; 
For overhead the angled beechnut hung. 
And hazels stood at hand. Here in the spring 
The gold of summer's sunrise — dandelions — 
And daisies, starry oxeyes, clustered near ; 
The earlier violets were not absent nor 
In later days the modest, showy bell. 
Blue, slender-hanging. So the summers passed. 
Rising and falling ; as his homestead grew 
The farmer mowed more widely, nor his flocks 
Demanded less his care in fold and field 
To bound ; and so as ever each day more 
He saw the need for labor, this one wall, 
Now old and overgrown, he eyed with pleasure ; 
The stones might fall away, the flooding rains 
That drove the stream up on the meadow-lands 
Might roll and still displace them, and the vines, 

4 49 



FIRST POEMS &- FRAGMENTS 



The wild grape and the bramble, force their way 
Disintegrating, still no care was his ; 
For over all the green was gathered close 
And densely massed, so that no glimpse beyond 
Greeted the searching eye ; and here I found 
The hedgerow standing as the sun had shaped it. 
Richly confused and prodigal and wild, 
And yet a straight, well-guided hedge and serving 
Its master better than he served himself, 
Adding to service beauty and a soul, 

SOLITUDE 

I KNOW a little patch of mountain ground 
Low-settled by itself; and Moosilauke 
Stands boldly in the west but never sees 
Its little group of buildings and the elm 
Close by the door. And farther in the north, 
Bearing his sun-scarred summit proudly forth, 
Stands noble Lafayette ; he looks abroad 
Across the sunny hamlet where the meadows 
Shine with a softer green, yet scarcely knows 
This low gray dwelling and beside the door 
Its ancient elm-tree ; yet do Lafayette 
And Moosilauke the mountain and the deep. 
Aspiring hills feel through their silent hearts 

50 



LONGER POEMS 



The birth and progress, Woodstock, of thy streams, 

Born of the mossy mountains and the rocks 

And running through the hills ; and they in turn 

Do visit and confirm the house in joy. 

Gray with the touch of nature, friend familiar 

Of forests and their mosses, with its roofs 

Long-sloping to the west, I see it stand, 

With gables not uncopied from the hills, 

The mountain house, the home of quietness. 

The village knew it not ; beyond the hill 

It was itself a hamlet ; here there stood 

Its tributary fields and pastures, here 

A crystal source of water and a world 

Of timber, and its flocks were on the hills. 

There lay the little graveyard in the pines. 

And these with larches and small maples made 

A decent graveyard shadow ; and I see 

One queer, untutored apple that has placed 

His foot beyond the pale, dropping his fruit 

On the most ancient grave ; all round about 

Are golden meadows quiet in the sun. 

With ombrel elm-trees dotting out the green. 

This is the gate to Solitude ; one day 
I crossed the yard to where an old man sat 
And questioned him, although I knew him not. 
Brought here among the sources of the hills 

51 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



Close to the thought of small simplicity. 

I asked him," Where is Solitude ? " He rose, 

And pointing with his cane across the ridge 

Described a course that drew my heart in joy ; 

" Beyond the sheepfold follow the small lane 

Across the first low ridge ; the cattle there 

Are mine and mine the pasture to the wood ; 

The lane will enter through the trees and lead 

A mile or more over and up the slope. 

There where you see the pines ; let down the bars 

At the upper end and that is Solitude." 

I never started out on any course 

With half the joy I felt for Solitude ! 

Rocks in the pasture lay, oases bare 

In deserts of green grass ! I moved among 

The beasts and stood beside them where they drank 

The stony pasture stream, where little grass 

Crept thickly down the bank beside the shallows. 

I wet my lips ; 't is like a sacrament 

To touch wild water where the cattle drink ; 

And more, I guessed it came from Solitude. 

Then at the entrance of the trees I stood. 

Ground the hard earth beneath my foot, and sent 

A proud glance northward ; he who thus can stand 

On Moosilauke and look on Lafayette 

Is master of the western hills ; below. 

Beyond the trees and pasture lay the valley 

52 



LONGER POEMS 



Voiceless and crowded by the mountains round 
In multitude so great I turned and fled 
Up the long, turning footway of the lane. 
Ah, silence in the forest ! I have learned 
More from the hush of forests than from speech 
Of many teachers, more of joy at least. 
And that quick sympathy where joy has birth ; 
A thousand times called outward from myself 
By life at every point, ten thousand things 
Speaking at once in tones so sharp and sweet 
Their voice was pain, but pain as life is pain 
Beneath the over-chorus of the sky ; 
In silence finding joy to know myself 
Deep in the heart of nature and the world. 
As one advances up the slow ascent 
Along the pathway in the woods the trees 
Change aspect, nor alone in this but change 
In stature and in power till Solitude 
Seems cut out of the ancient forest. Here 
Was Solitude ! where man had lived of old. 
Loved, serving God, and built himself a home. 
Man smooths an acre on the rolling earth. 
Turns up the mould and reaps the gifts of God ; 
Plucks down the apple from the tree, the tree 
From empire in the forest, builds a home ; 
Turns for a bout among his brothers, wins 
A sister to his wife and gets an heir ; 

53 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



And then as here in Solitude departs \ 

And leaves small mark behind. The place is rare j 

In this high epic of the human life. 

Where wildness has been wilderness shall be, 

But give God time ; and life is but a span, 

Nine inches, while before it and behind 

Stretches the garden of the cosmic gods ; 

For after London, England shall be wild ..^ 

And none can thaw the iceberg at the pole. | 

In Solitude one sees the winding trace ^ 

Of what has been a road, a block of stone 

Footworn, that lies along the dim pathway j 

Before one old foundation; and the rest j 

Is freaks of grass among the rising growth 

Of birch and maple that another year 

Shall see almost a forest. 



VII 
PUTATIS LUCUM LIGNA 

YE seem intent to stand alone 
Monarchs, ye men, of stock and stone; 
The forest dead and everywhere 
Untenanted the fields of air. 
To view a wood unwilling, ye 

54 



LONGER POEMS 



Who for the timber hate the tree ! 
Will ye cast nature from her throne 
And waste the earth you call your own ? 
Descending from the Lincoln hills 
I came where join the Woodstock rills; 
Across the east a smoky veil 
Lets not, or day or night, to trail 
Words dire in meaning, seen before 
By Dante on the infernal door ! 
For pant of engines on the air 
Shatters the mountain silence where 
Five-throated, bound with iron bands, 
The havoc of the forest stands ! 

Where man has conquered nature dies 
From out her own familiar skies, 

And nature loves her child ; 
' T is nature loves the running brooks. 
Not man but nature guards the nooks 

From, which they are beguiled. 
Infinite labor gives them birth. 
The rocks, the deeps below the earth. 
And dusky shadows bring them forth 

As weak as they are wild. 
The earth will, all in little room 
Become a garden, then a tomb ; 

Then keep it while ye may 

55 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



A little wild, where we may see 
The unthreatened glory of a tree, 

And feel the fountain's spray. 
Reserve one spot where we may find 
An untamed accent in the wind ; 
And beds of moss unbroken, where 
To mark the footprint of the bear ; 
One stream of water mountain-pure 
Wherein the wild trout may endure 
And the wild deer may drink and bathe secure ! 



50 



SONNETS 
I -XVI 



I 



THE flood of life that turned away 
In search of rarer things, the rose, 
The fragile flower that bursting blows, 
And as it blows turns to decay, 
Once more seeks rest along the way 
Of earlier days and finds repose 
In love of each green thing that grows, 
A bunch of grass, an alder spray. 
You common things I hold you dear 
And beg the comfort you can give ; 
The faith that bears you through the year. 
The courage both to die and live ; 
Believing that I too shall hear 
The mountains fall, and shall not grieve. 



59 



FIRST POEMS 6r FRAGMENTS 



II 



TEN thousand fancies flitting through the mind, 
An impulse here, a half-created thought 
Are, in the stress of fancied duty, taught 
To bow and pass and leave no trace behind. 
Or carelessness, destructive as the wind, 
More prodigal than nature, valuing not 
The store of life that pain and joy have wrought 
Laughs and forgets, blind leader of the blind ! 
We are but open caskets whence are fled 
The choicest gifts God-given ; while we retain 
Indifference with a blustering hardihead. 
And querulousness before a righteous pain ; 
Pale pietism, when virtue's self is dead. 
With smug conceit impregnable and vain. 



60 



SONNETS 



III 



U 



MERCY ! Justice ! Ah, no ! Heaven's gate ! 
Heaven's gate ! " 
Panic above the crash of trampling horse 
And rush of wings upright against the course, 
A cry of gods confounded under fate ! 
In tumult deep and inarticulate 
The angelic press burst outward, of the Source 
Of bulk Omnipotence compelled by force — 
Save Lucifer, omnipotent in hate. 
Bright as the dying day, with one black cloud 
Up-marshalled from the south and crossing o'er 
The glory and blotting out the evening star. 
So for a space he stood ; then silent bowed, 
And from the battlements outspringing far 
Deep into darkness all his anguish bore. 



6i 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



IV 



I LOVE the hills but she the open shore, 
The shore because it lies along the sea. 
I would be lofty, solitary, free, 
Selfish at times ; at times, hearing the roar 
Of the ocean where beneath the bending oar 
It does the planet service, I would be 
As rich in blessing, yea, as rich as she 
Is rich in blessing ; I could not be more. 
I walk apart, my heart is in the sky, 
Yet ever yearning downward to the land ; 
She walks where all the world is crowding by 
And holds a little child in either hand ; 
I bless her service with a troubled cry 
Of one who would but cannot understand. 



62 



SONNETS 



I CANNOT face the utterance of a prayer 
In innocence ; I know not by what gate 
Egress it finds beyond the fields of air ; 
In what vain corridor my words may wait. 
A mystic once, I did communicate 
With my own self and thought with God to share 
My hope and aspiration ; but of late 
My words, like Noah's dove, returning bare, 
I feel the confines of my spirit's heaven. 
Against the limits of myself in vain 
They strike and bruise their wings and downward 

fall. 
Then to myself, Peace ! do I cry, and call 
That sufferance peace which yet is perfect pain : 
In courage, Peace ! when there is no peace given. 



63 



FIRST POEMS 6r FRAGMENTS 



VI 



TO catch at that which never can be caught, 
To yearn for what thou never shalt attain 
(Nature's own motions moving in the brain) 
This is thy Ufe and thou by her art taught. 
This is her gift ; to thee if welcome not 
With all its store of passion and of pain, 
Thou hast the power to give it back again 
And break the bow before thou triest the shot. 
Nay rather let me live to fight the fight 
And die the death, when driven against the wall. 
That many a man has fairly fought and died. 
Then shall I keep the spark she gave me bright 
(Gigantic mirth, that gave it to deride ! ) 
And cast it at the heavens even as I fall. 



64 



SONNETS 



VII 



A MONTH ago the cloud alone was fair. 
None watched the leafless tree-tops, thin and 
dry, 
Hold up their slender fans against the sky 
Save here a poet and a dreamer there. 
But now the sun through the soft, golden air 
Requires an incense from the flowers that lie 
Within a thousand vales ; and low and high 
The broad earth doth a pale green mantle wear. 
Now voices are where all was still before ; 
By each green leaf there trembles a brown wing ; 
A thousand small lives wake beside my door 
And each one turns to labor and to sing. 
At last man feels the tumult of the spring 
And looks upon the universe once more. 



65 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



VIII 

A THOUSAND flowerets of a thousand hues 
Born of the sunset and the early dawn, 
Burn in the darker forest and suffuse 
An unimagined brightness o'er the lawn. 
These are the days I give my heart in pawn 
To thee, O nature, and the world refuse ; 
These are the days I feel my footsteps drawn 
To seek the wayward motions of the muse ! 
I have not long enough on earth to stay 
To lose the joy of one bright summer day ; 
One quiet day of peace, ah many a one ! 
Full of the song of birds and tremulous 
With sunshine ; let the world seek after us : 
The muse and I are wandering with the sun. 



66 



SONNETS 



IX 



I STOOD long time and listened to the wind 
That tossed the fallen foliage o'er and o'er ; 
Long time I stood ; then turned within to bind 
An evergreen upon the open door. 
When winter comes to sweep across the floor 
And freeze the panes perforce the huswife mind 
Shuts-to the autumnal door and there reclined 
Battens on books till summer comes once more. 
I cannot stop her ; turning to the shelves 
Her idleness she feeds on other men ; 
Takes what she finds, complaining not and delves 
In mines deep-sunken with the golden pen ; 
Then weary grows and longs to see again 
The spirits of the sky, the woodland elves. 



67 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



MOOSILAUKE IN DECEMBER 

THE wet, brown leaves of winter on the ground 
Unkempt they looked or evil, one by one 
Called back to vision by a careless sun ; 
He should by this have reached his southern bound 
Leaving December earth all straitly gowned 
In decent white ; but here we trod upon 
Her bosom black, uncovered and undone, 
And shrank from many a wet and naked wound. 
The Parthian sun his arrows to the head 
Drew, and within the field a little rill 
Beneath an edge of morning ice awoke ; 
A line down through the mat-brown grass it led 
White, threaded with the blue the heavens spill. 
And tinkled coldly past a frozen oak. 



68 



SONNETS 



Light veils of snow the west wind bore along, 
White shadows, drifted through the upper air . 

Above the valley ; they were very fair « 

And passed in music like a summer song. 
I stood upon a mountain ; here the strong 
Wild-Ammonoosuc rolled in forests bare, 
A tumult in his hollow pathway ; there 
Whispered through Wildwood with an icy tongue. 
The sunlight shone on Kinsman through the cloud 
And turned the little falling snow to gold 
Which never reached the earth, but it went back 
Into the chambers of the air ; the loud. 
White shepherd west wind drove into the fold 
And forests waving showed his vanished track. 



6q 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 

Standing above the Tunnel gorge, the brook 
Unseen, unheard below I knew laid out 
And trimmed its tenements for April's trout, 
Rested and ran from hidden nook to nook. 
The wintry forests in the wind had shook 
December from their branches ; round about, 
The sun had aided in the season's rout 
To Moosilauke ; and when to him I look. 
White snow and winter build in me a sense, 
Structured on beauty awful and serene. 
Of majesty, a pressing sense of fear. 
I never saw a vision more intense 
In awfulness than that tremendous scene — 
Black Moosilauke, uprising dark and near ! 



70 



SONNETS 

So very near ! Far down, the Tunnel run 
Crept out beneath the mountain's heavy base ; 
Buttress and bastion mounting I could trace 
In upright courses to the supreme One, 
High, distant dome where-over bits of sun 
Ran with the rolling clouds a windy race. 
But all beneath was blackness, and my face 
A breath as of the mountain fell upon. 
A whisper from the mountain came across, 
So dark, so strong ! a breath in blackness drawn. 
Long drawn and deep, so near we were and high ! 
And then it seemed a simple child might toss 
Against the opposed wall a pebble-stone, 
Deep in the Tunnel gorge to roll and lie. 



71 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



XI 



THE poet stoops and plucks a little flower 
To tell his greatness in a simple song ; 
He does not need through seasons to prolong 
A mighty work to manifest his power ; 
Which still is simple, still the common dower 
If unexpressed, of many in the throng 
Unconscious who, with poetry along. 
In life's sojourn spend many a happy hour. 
So Burns delights us with a lowly lay. 
The warm expression of a simple joy ; 
So Wordsworth, moving through each quiet day, 
Forgets not the quick impulse of the boy ; 
And midst thy passion, Shelley, to destroy, 
Thou'st found the truth along the lyric way. 



72 



SONNETS 



XII 



I HATE the vast array of " modern " things, 
Gilt and pale purple, yellow, pink, and white ; 
Dull imitations and a thousand light 
And weightless books of verse and copyings. 
There are so many ! Every season brings 
A thousand fashions new and with delight 
Proclaims them beautiful ; till I take flight 
And turn me to the masters and the kings. 
And yet they will not let the masters be ; 
I find my Walton in a showy dress ; 
Find all the bright, old-age simplicity 
Bedecked and botched , the years of good Queen 

Bess 
Are made the dull phillstine's property ; 
And Burns is " popularly " sent to press. 



73 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



XIII 

HIGH on a sunward-mounting precipice 
Edged with a cloud that all before me ran, 
I backward gazed and pictured, span by span, 
How I had mounted upward from the abyss ; 
By what a confused pathway come to this. 
The end of earth ; and saw the future's plan 
Grow, " minimize the universe to man," 
And build a daring, nobler edifice. 
Ah, struggle to assume this new control 
And seek thy higher reaches, O my soul ! 
Thou 'rt sure of this, thy feet are on the earth 5 
Forget it, it remains ; but let thine eyes 
Lead on thy heart, and find beyond the skies 
At least the promise of an upward birth. 



74 



SONNETS 



XIV 



HONEY of woodland wild and of the hill, 
The juices of the maple and the cane 
And all the fulness of the fallen grain ; 
The pauses in the running of the rill. 
Silence of distant meadows, voices far 
Of unseen swallows in the upper air ; 
The beauty of the bending bough ; the rare. 
Soft rose, the sunbeam and the melting star — 
What are they all but shadows in the night 
To thee, where beauty burns a perfect light ! 
I see thee standing gracefuller than grass, 
Nakeo, with one foot in the lingering stream, 
The sun upon thee, perfect ! or alas. 
Is it not thee, my dryad, but a dream ! 



75 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



XV 



THE warm, moist kiss of April on the grass ; 
The stooping sun, the wet and fragrant plain ; 
The voice of life, low-whispered as I pass ; 
The vision of the summer through the rain ; 
A thousand thoughts borne outward from the mind 
Laughing at nature, caught and held again 
Close to the stirring heart, till like the grain 
In autumn they are scattered by the wind ! 
And some may range along the open sky, 
And some may fall and Uve and some may die. 
I care not now whether the wanton air 
Rid me of flying chaff or sift the seed 
Of future promise ; or if this, indeed. 
My present fancy lead me anywhere ! 



76 



SONNETS 



XVI 



I LAID upon a rock beside the sea 
A spray of eglantine where all about 
The water rushed in torrents in and out 
Among the wet, black rocks tempestuously. 
To eastward high, a little promont'ry 
Up-bore the billows on his iron breast ; 
And thence they rolled beyond him to the west 
Surging about my eglantine and me. 
And of the mightiest waves their spray that cast 
White and imperious far into the air, 
Not one but passed the sweet-briar safely by. 
Till, midst the churning foam and surges there 
That reached but could not clutch it, rising high 
The tide itself did take it at the last. 



n 



FRAGMENTS 
I-V 

1 



IN the low-lying April afternoon 
The earth was hushed within a mellow mist 
Across the new brown meadows ; the white sun 
Was gathered in a knot of clouds and gave 
No thought of an infinity beyond. 
Each blade of grass was conscious of its shadow ; 
The sounds of birds and waters and the air 
Were stilled within the silence where I sat 
Beside, and as I sat I felt the least 
Of nature's children that around me played, 
And all was like a dream. I gathered up 
A handful of the grass and then forgot it ; 
I felt a gentle rising of the wind 
And heard a sparrow whisper close at hand, 
With other little life beside me ; but 
The distance faded and the nearness grew 
Confused to a fancy in the gray, 
The desolate gray shadow of the earth. 
Unreal and dimly dying from my thought 
Till all was nothing save the sun and me. 



8i 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 



II 



WESTWARD I walked; the sun was low; 
the plain, 
Seeming to rise before me, with the earth 
Revolving, rolling backward to the east, 
Shut out the dropping sun. I hastened on. 
But still the day grew darker as the west 
Drew in its last, white, fading fan of light. 
And all the world was cold ; and when the land 
Ceased to reflect the sky, and heavy lay. 
And dully, by itself, I came where spread 
A darkling mirror, whitened half, and blue. 
Still cherishing a faint thought of the sky. 
The hour was calm, forgetful of the day, 
Where toward the noon the pattering rain did 

beat 
The fragrant earth; a soft green mist arose 
And lay across the opening fields ; and then. 
Sweeping the huddled air around the world 
The silver storm scowled black; o'er all the sky 
It tore itself in fury and ran low 
Across the shuddering earth ; it seized the trees. 
It seized the mountains in its gloomy hands 
And shook them ; while the terror stricken streams 
Leaped madly on to aid the warring sea. 
Then in the thronging blackness of the storm 

82 



FRAGMENTS 



I had rejoiced, as now I smiled to see 

The fair, white, gentle surface of the lake 

And feel the air fall softly ; at my feet 

The waters rose Hke coming thoughts that faD 

Forgotten, and my mind rose till it ran 

As smoothly as the yet unbroken wave. 



Ill 



THE wild-eyed, savage gull, with bowM wing, 
tips 
The white, flat surface of the misty sea ; 
Or, stooping in the wind-trod, hollow wave. 
Reels upward straight, hangs quivering, his whole 

self 
Intent, and breaks the surface like a bolt ! 
This spirit of the mystery of the sea 
Sweeps by in silence on the noisy scud, 
Or bursts across the borders of the storm, 
A flash of horrid white ; with beating wing 
Struggles in futile, royal wrath against 
The armed battalions of a mighty wind, 
And beaten, leaps aloft upon the storm 
To ride in fury down the conquering gale. 
Away, thou symbol of my own gray thoughts ! 
Whenever from the heaven of weary hopes 



83 



FIRST POEMS Sr FRAGMENTS 

The clouds run low in the palely flowing sky; 
Whenever from the world of the unachieved 
The mists mount up to meet the drooping cloud, 
And I between them fail, 't is thou I see, 
Thou dreadful emblem of my darker life ! 
Thou art no child of sunlight, for indeed. 
Whether beneath some purple summer eve 
Thou weariest thy way into the west. 
Or in the winter on the frozen bay 
Standest erect, a white, mad, ravened king, 
Life-banished by the ice, thou art the same. 
Grim, busy with thyself, hard, gloomy, wild. 



IV 



AT sunset in the college close the light 
Falls like a benediction softly down ; 
Here is a moving stillness in the air. 
Quiet, as though the now deserted east 
Had laid its empty hand upon the lawns 
And hushed the world ; from out the glowing west 
The sunlight settles on each tender leaf. 
And entering in the gentle, empty cells 
Calls through the hollow tubes ; down to the earth 
Trembles the peaceful summons ; and the grass 
Drinks in the sunset light, except where lie 

84 



FRAGMENTS 



Dark traceries of black upon the green, 
Left mourning for the sun the while the tree 
Laughs with its selfish seizure of the light ! 
This is the life of peace ; but on the sky 
The city in the distance casts a light 
Brilliant and false, electric, publishing 
Confusion and false day, nature betrayed, 
And all the dark disguises of the town ; 
The frantic strivings after more, that choke 
The holy fact of life, which single here 
Sits at the heart and bids the rest be still. 



WHEN the low sun descends on Hamlet hill 
And this my maple throws a longer line 
Of lengthening shadow down across the slope, 
Then has a day departed, casting yet 
A lingering light from sidelong slopes and hills 
That run into the west. Much would I love 
One passing day to live beneath my tree. 
And there vi^ithin its shadow on the earth 
Move with the moving sun a mutual course. 
First in the dawning is the crystal light 
Scarce sprinkled o'er the hill, while all the heaven 
Sheds seeming equal brightness on the world ; 

85 



FIRST POEMS £r FRAGMENTS 



But after comes the round, revealing sun, 
To mark his influence and define the earth, 
Giving my tree its shadow on the ground. 
And therein would I rest and through the day 
Follow it lengthening downward past the noon ; 
See the light grasses and the browsed tufts 
Of pasture herbage tremble in the sun, 
Pale upland asters, dusty goldenrod. 
And all the autumn flowering of the fields ; 
Then feel them sink to quietness within 
The slow advancing shadow. I should find 
A joy in the light liftings of the leaves. 
Breeze-shifted shadows trembling, little rays 
Of unexpected light along the ground. 
Then as the day advanced to its fall 
And this my maple's shadow crept along 
Downward, I should forget the lesser life 
Of grass blade and of sunny pebble-stone, 
Feeling the great fact of the day's decline. 
The coming of the hour when all the hill 
Would cast its shadow ; of the later night. 
The shadow of the earth. Thus would I Hve, 
And one day thus bid welcome and depart. 



86 



POEMS 

A.D. MDCCCXCVIII 



TO CITRIODORA 

I turn and see you passing in the street 
When you are not. I take another njjay, 
Lest missing you the fragrance of the day 
Exhale y and I kno^w not that it is suceet. 
And marking you Ifollo^w^ and njohen njce meet 
Lo've laughs to see ho^w sudden I am gay ; 
S^iveetens the air ~uuith fragrance like a spray 
Of s^weet uerbena^ and bids my heart to heat, 

Lo've laughs-^ and girls that take you by the handy 
Knonju that a suueet thing has befallen them ,• 
And n^vomen gi=ve their hearts into your heart. 
'There is, I think, no man in all the land 
But njoould he glad to touch your garmenf s hem. 
And /, / lo^e you nxith a lo've apart. 



I 

SPINOZA polished glasses clear 
To view the heavenly hemisphere ; 
I verses, that my friend therethrough 
My arc of earth may rightly view. 



I 



II 

F one should call my branching verse 
Bundles of fagot sticks, or worse, 

Each bush, I pray, let shed perfume. 
And burn with fire and not consume; 

And may each branch, Hke Aaron's rod, 
Bud and betray the vital god. 



Ill 

BROTHER, Time is a thing how slight 
Day lifts and falls, and it is night. 
Rome stands an hour, and the green leaf 
Buds into being bright and brief. 
For us, God has at least in store 
One shining moment, less or m^ore. 
Seize, then, what mellow sun we may. 
To light us in the darker day. 

91 



POEMS 



IV 



" jy ELIEVE in me ! " Lord, who art thou 
J3That bid'st me to believe in thee? 
I have my life to live, and now 

Thy yoke would but a burden be ; 
I would be free. 

" Come, follow me ! " Nay, Lord, my way 
Is wide of thine along the sea ; 
Among the hills I love to stray. 

Nor walks there anyone with me ; 
Why I with thee ? 



(C 



MARCH 20 

RETURN, return ! " the unheard cry 
Of robins in the upper sky. 
As by and long this barren coast. 
In March comes up the southern host. 

Low-anchored in the tangled swale 
I mark them slant along the gale, 
At speed, with every feather set 
For some more distant harbor yet. 



92 



POEMS 

Around me is the mellow lisp 
Of bluebirds warbling, and the crisp 
Chick ! of the sparrow, and the cheer 
Of homing robins harbored here. 

No forward aspen-leaf or oak 
Has through his leathern jacket broke; 
The grass puts up a doubtful wing ; 
The hazel censers coldly swing. 

But maple-buds, new fashioned 
On every stem, are tipped with red. 
Green, safFern-flushing osiers glow 
Above the wakened waters' flow. 

Year in, year out, the fire of spring 
Burns through its ashen covering, 
Bursts up in flower and scent and song, 
And drives the laggard March along. 

Year after year the birds will fly 
Along this same gray, mortal sky. 
Praise God I see them and can say. 
Another year, another day ! 



93 



POEMS 

VI 

THE SPARROW 

THE morning lay divinely bright 
Across near field and distant height. 
From his high tower the influent sun 

Controlled the shifting tides of air, 
Which first in flow would lightly run, 
Then fall in ebb of radiance rare. 

One sparrow on an elm-tree high 
Conceived the day as fair as I. 
Midway the high bank of the tree 

He sat upon a beaked branch. 
And poured into the engulfing sea 

His music's slender avalanche. 

His pipe was sharp, his numbers few. 
And caught no ear but me and you. 
Yet forth upon his promontory 

He stood in the wide sea of air. 
And bore his witness to the glory 

With all the heart a thrush might dare. 



94 



POEMS 

VII 

PRESTO 

QUICK-fingered Spring her wand choragic, 
A cherry branch, has waved in air; 
And swift by arts of natural magic 

The clustered cherry-blooms are there. 

You 've seen the children in their pastime 

Plunge rods into a syrop thick, 
Three times or four, and at the last time 

Hold up in joy a candy-stick. 

You 've seen a chemist, quick and curious, 

Observe a liquid saturate. 
And mark, when least the jar seemed furious, 

The crystal-flowers precipitate. 

And now, of cherry-blooms creator 

Ere yet the woods and walks are green, 

Rose-fingered prestidigitator. 

Young chemic Spring at work you 've seen 



95 



o 



POEMS 

VIII 

IN DOVE COTTAGE GARDEN 

N the terrace lies the sunlight, fretted with 
the shade 
Of the wilding apple-orchard Wordsworth made. 



Sunlight falls upon the aspen, and the cedar glows 
Like the laurel or the cHmbing Christmas rose. 

Through green-golden vistas downward if your 
glances fall. 
Hardly would you guess the cottage there at all. 

Bines of bryony and bramble overhang the green 
Of the crowding scarlet-runner and the bean. 

But I mark one quiet casement, ivy-covered still. 
There he sat, I think, and loved this little hill ; 

Loved the rocky stair that led him upward to the 
seat 
Coleridge fashioned ; loved the fragrant, high 
retreat 

In the wood above the garden. There he walked, 
and there 
In his heart the beauty gathered to a prayer. 

96 



POExMS 

In the sunshine by the cottage doorway I can see, 
In among her Christmas roses, Dorothy. 

Deeper joy and truer service, fuller draught of life, 
Came I doubt not to the sister, and the wife. 

Laurel, it may be, too early on his brow he set, 
And the thorn of life too lightly could forget. 

Dorothy, wild heart and woman, chose the better 
way. 
Met the world with love and service every day. 

Love for Hfe and life for loving, and the poet's part 
Is to love his life and, living, love his art. 

But the shadow from the fellside falls, and all the 
scene 
Melts and runs, green-gold to slumbrous golden- 
green. 

Showers of golden light on Grasmere tremble into 
shade. 
While the garden grasses gather blade with blade ; 

And one patient robin-redbreast, waiting, waiting 
long. 
Seals the twilight in the garden with a song. 



97 



POEMS 

IX 

A WREATH OF BUDS AND LAVENDER 



D 



EATH has a power to fright the soul, 
And unseat courage from control. 



But when, by love and sorrow led, 

I passed your door and looked, with dread 

To see the symbols of the dead ^ 

And found, in place of black despair, 
Which I all-looked for, hanging there 
A wreath of buds and lavender j 

I blessed the heart that would out-brave, 
For love, the terror of the grave. 



X 

SWEET THORN 

WHAT is St. Francis' flower ? 'T is not 
The daisy nor the melilot. 
Nor that white little flower that springs 
In Grasmere's quiet garden-plot. 

98 



POEMS 

'Tis not the lily-flower that blows 
In some high heaven of repose. 

'T is not the sorrow of the thorn, 
Nor utter passion of the rose. 

It is the wild-heart eglantine, 
(Sweet bush to a far sweeter wine). 

With joy for man, sweet-thorn for Christ, 
Not pagan all, not all divine. 



XI 

SILKWEED 

LIGHTER than dandelion down. 
Or feathers from the white moth's wing, 
Out of the gates of bramble-town 
The silkweed goes a-gypsying. 

Too fair to fly in autumn's rout. 

All winter in the sheath it lay ; 
But now, when spring is pushing out, 

The zephyr calls, "Away ! Away ! " 

Through mullein, bramble, brake, and fern, 
Up from their cradle-spring they fly. 

Beyond the boundary wall to turn 
And voyage through the friendly sky. 

99 



POEMS 

Softly, as if instinct with thought, 

They float and drift, delay and turn ; 

And one avoids and one is caught 
Between an oak-leaf and a fern. 

And one holds by an airy line 

The spider drew from tree to tree ; 

And if the web is light and fine, 
'T is not so light and fine as he ! 

And one goes questing up the wall 
As if to find a door ; and then. 

As if he did not care at all. 

Goes over and adown the glen. 

And all in airiest fashion fare 

Adventuring, as if, indeed, 
'T were not so grave a thing to bear 

The burden of a seed ! 



100 



POEMS 

XII 

THE FIRE-FLY 

TO-DAY as writing in the park 
I. sat, came twilight and the dark. 

There as I watched the color run 

In waves above the sunken sun, 

A lightning-bug, (for candle), took 

His post just here upon my book. 

His wing he raised, his golden urn 

Of fire he let a moment burn. 

Pray, for his sake, behold this line 
With a not common brightness shine. 

XIII 
CLEAR AND FAR 

HOW clear, when 't is most far from clear, 
Far sounds across the dark you hear : 

Approaching wheels, when in the lane 

The mist is turning into rain ; 

A baying hound below the hill ; 

A train, when all the night is still. 

The silent air, now dense and drowned, 

A carriage makes for every sound. 
How far, when 't is from clear most far, 
Most clear at night far noises are. 

lOI 



POEMS 

XIV 
ARCHITECTURE 

YOU 'VE seen a sky, besprent with mist 
Across the sleepy amethyst, 
Break when the western wind has sent 
His harriers to the orient. 

Then in the azure deeps - 
Gathers the mist and sleeps . 
In snowy towering heaps. 

You 've seen the leafy storm of May 
Sweep the brown April earth like spray, 
And round some gray stem, bare of late. 
In full and body nucleate. 

Then all the earliest trees 

Hang out upon the breeze 

Their perfumed greeneries. 

In the vexed heaven of the mind 
You 've seen a fresh, irradiant wind 
Clear all and set in order fair 
The gray untextured vapors there. 

Then quick from every part 

The towering fancies start 

In frame and form of art. 



102 



POEMS 

XV 

TO A PINE-TREE 

IF I could stand in such a plain, 
With such bright sap in every vein ; 
Could throw upon so blue an air, 
Branches so light and strong and fair; 

If I could sink my roots so deep 
In darkness where the spirits creep, 
So broadly base, so firmly rear 
My stem in such an atmosphere ; 

If I could balance and reveal 
So utterly from head to heel 
The music I was born to be, 
In strophe and antistrophe ; 

Thou 'dst not more nobly stand and shine 
Than I, proud Atlantean pine. 

XVI 
OPAL 

PALE as a pearl the morning lay 
In cloud diaphanous and gray ; 
While slow the smothered sun goes by 
A smouldering opal in the sky. 

103 



POEMS 

Faint color in the wood he throws 
Like scattered petals of a rose ; 
And lays by every stem a hue 
Most sagely, delicately blue. 



XVII 
MORNING 

NOT least, 't is ever my delight 
To drink the early morning light ; 
To take the air upon my tongue 
And taste it while the day is young. 
So let my solace be the breath 
Of morning, when I move to death, 



XVIII 

I KNOW not what it is, but when I pass 
Some running bit of water by the way, 
A river brimming silver in the grass. 
And rippled by a trailing alder-spray. 

Hold in my heart I cannot from a cry, 
It is so joyful at the merry sight ; 

So gracious is the water running by. 
So full the simple grass is of delight. 

104 



POEMS 

And if by chance a redwing, passing near, 
Should light beside me in the alder-tree ; 

And if, above the ripple, I should hear 
The lusty conversation of the bee, 

I think that I should lift my voice and sing; 

I know that I should laugh and look around. 
As if to catch the meadows answering. 

As if expecting whispers from the ground. 



XIX 

ANADYOMENE 

GIVE o'er the strife ! The poet cries 
The maiden mercy, in whose eyes 
He sees the light of paradise. 

Beyond the coppice, at the edge 
Where ends the poet's Privilege 
Along the lake, in June one day 
I sat to meditate this lay ; 
Wherein, forgetting Love, I planned 
To sing the sea and sky and land. 
And first, the picture — all the scene 
A dark uninterrupted green. 
No flower uplifted from the floor 
Breaks from the forest to the shore. 

105 



POEMS 

No dafFodil that nods along 

The bloss'my banks of English song ; 

Myrtles nor roses, that entwine 

In many a fragrant Attic line, 

Here spring, to aid while I rehearse 

The homely numbers of my verse. 

Poppy nor violet is here, 

Where fern, with cornel and severe 

Bay, and the low-set laurel shine 

Beneath a sombre front of pine. 

Here as I lay among the brakes 

I watched the bright, green forest-snakes, 

The wasp go over, and the toad 

Sit undecided of his road ; 

And sudden, from a tufted top. 

The gray, silk-cinctured spider drop. 

Out of the high, benignant blue 

The earth a golden opiate drew. 

Low-lying, level waves of heat 

Along the glassed waters beat. 

Each ashen stem and each green leaf 

Lay sunned asleep ; and every sheaf 

Of needles, glittering on the pines, 

Inwove the light in glancing lines. 

Until I too had slept, ere this. 

But for the chimes I would not miss. 

What sound was there ? A chipping bird 
That idly in the bushes stirred j 
io6 



POEMS 

A locust droning in the brake ; 
The hum the darting midges make. 
What sound was there ? A sudden wind 
That caught the ripples from behind 
And kissed them as they ran ; that drave 
The whispering rout within the cave 
In rocks below me where I lay. 
You would have said 't was elves at play, 
With muffled hammers keeping time 
Beneath the wave in some cool chime 
On amber bells, — k-link, k-lunk, 
(With quiet joy the sound I drunk), 
K-link, k-lunk ! Now high, now low. 
The chimes came bubbling from below. 
If I could get into my rhymes 
The lapping music of the chimes. 
All men who read would run once more 
To hear the ripples on the shore. 
Then, as the last light wave of air 
Drew off in ebb and failure there. 
Fell back, and faintly, far away. 
Broke in the pines across the bay. 
Low on the fall and silence crept 
A sudden sound, then sank and slept. 
Again, in pulse and faint, awoke 
In matted leaves of pine and oak. 
Where through the jungle of the grass 
The armies of the emmets pass. 



107 



POEMS 

Then on that cess and failure came, 
As from a crypt and smothered flame, 
An incense, on the fall and swell 
Of every piny thurible. 
No scent of rose or spices rare 
Perfum.ed the quiet courses there; 
No scattered homely mint and thyme 
Wove in the sun an odorous rhyme ; 
But June upon the air abroad 
Summoned the soul of leaf and sod, 
Shot v^ith the glamour, and divine 
With the o'er-mastering scent of pine. 

Ah Summer, Summer ! Fragrant June, 
Sweet as a moth from the cocoon ! 
My thoughts in winter come and go 
As aimless as the errant snow ; 
Or lie, by wind and weather pressed, 
A dumb conservator at best. 
But April comes, and to the plain 
They fall and labor with the rain ; 
Sing as they fall and fallen, jet 
Their life into the violet ; 
And measure, in this homely rune. 
The drowsy summer-song of June. 

This was the picture ; this the green 
And golden magic of the scene ; 
The lapping music, and the boon 

io8 



POEMS 

Delight of lotos-drowsy June, 

Ungraced and unadorned. Was heard 

No mellow-ringing song of bird ; 

No grace of woven grasses spread, 

With white and purple diapred 

Of blooms, to strike and snare the sense 

With jets of odorous frankincense. 

But peaceful as I lay and took 

These fancies down, (to make my book), 

Out of the lake, in spite of me, 

She rose, Anadyomene ! 



Give o'er the strife ! The poet cries 
The maiden mercy, in whose eyes 
He sees the light of paradise. 
She came, and shot through that dull clime 
Sharp scent of marjoram and thyme, 
Cool vervain, and the forest rang 
Quick with the song my own heart sang. 
She came, with love, and in one ray 
Redeemed the dulness of the day, 
Until the world, (sea, sky, and land), 
Lay in the hollow of her hand. 



109 



POEMS 

XX 

PROCESSIONAL 

BENEATH the rooftree of the dark, 
Like Noah shut within the ark, 
I welcome from the waste of night 
The earliest olive-branch of light. 

Like Jacob, I my load of sleep 
Cast oiF and see the angels creep. 
Processional in bright array 
Up the wide avenues of day ; 

See with Isaiah one who flies 
From that high orient sacrifice, 
Who, with a live coal in his hand. 
Touches to voice th' unpurged land. 

Then swift from hazel copse and brake 
The voices, voices, voices wake. 
In twilight woods, in choired bush, 
Antiphonal to the sweet thrush. 

Like rain across the eastern hill 
The dropping harmonies distil, 
Or run upon the roseate sky 
In silver bars of melody. 

TIG 



POEMS 

The notes upon the chorded air 
Vibrate in thrilling pulse of prayer, 
And on my heart responses win, 
The harp without, the harp within. 

Each morning on the walls of night 
Unfolds the oriflamme of light. 
Each murning westward with the sun, 
A tide of song, the voices run ; 

A hint of that clear day of gold 
The dewy morn has aye foretold. 
When these fresh voices shall prolong 
An everlasting morning-song. 



XXI 

TO A BULL-FROG 

THOU hoarse Aristophanic mime. 
Grotesque Silenus of the slime. 
That dar'st to lift a comic voice 
Where thrushes worship and rejoice, 

When I would build, apart from space, 
A simple shrine with simple grace. 

And lift the walls and arches there 
Of all that 's high-distilled and fair, 

III 



POEMS 

God knows, who is the architect 

Of all I summon and reject, 

Thy mask is there, and with the choir 
Thy hoary bass-note will aspire. 



XXII 
ROSE IN GRAY 

LIGHTLY moves the silver moon 
Through these glimmering nights of June, 
Lightly falls, and in the shine 
Of her moon-rays hyaline. 
Lifts the nightfall and the hush 
From the red rose on the bush, 
And the rose's heart discovers 
To her nightly wandering lovers 

I could tell you, Phyllis dear. 
How the rose looked faint and clear 
In the moonlight ; how she burned 
Like the sacred fire inurned ; 
Distant, with the far-withdrawn 
Sweet shamefacedness of dawn ; 
Quaintly cool, with yet the glow 
Of a lamp through falling snow. 



112 



POEMS 

So ; but when I whisper, " Sweet, 
Take my hand, come let us see 't," 
'T is the very smothered rose 
In your milk-white cheek that glows, 



XXIII 
TO FLOWERS 

VITAL breathings of delight 
Flush your cheeks with blue and gold, 
Painted bannerets of light. 

Picketed 'twixt cold and cold. 

Yet with purpose bear ye must 

Seasoned cannikins of fruit, 
Ere the red autumnal rust 

Crinkles downward to the root. 

This your little year, as ours. 
Blossoms cannot make sublime. 

Ye are rooted in the hours. 
Ye are passengers of time. 



113 



POEMS 

XXIV 
ON COMING OF AGE 

THROUGH days wherein I heard no purpose 
speak, 
Through years that passed me as a quiet stream, 
I dreamed and did not seek ; to-day I seek 
Who may no longer dream. 



I 



XXV 

T is long waiting for the dear companions. 
The friends that come not, though God knows I 
need them. 

I smile and wait; and yet 

The heart will fret. 



A white cloud in the east is shining ; sadly 
I see ; my heart is all too full of longing. 

With the old-time delight 

To view the sight. 

Wherefore I turn and in the eyes of women. 
In the strong hands of men, seek compensation, 

My prayer begins and ends, 

God give me friends. 
114 



POEMS 



XXVI 

MARY, when the wild-rose 
Blossomed on the vine, 
Hearts were light, eyes were bright, 
But none so bright as thine. 

Lightly the month of May, 

Sweet bud of June, 
Opened like a rose in gray. 

Under the moon. 

When the heart of summer 

Withered with rust. 
Bitter blows laid the rose 

Broken in the dust. 

Crystal wells, amber wells, 

On the hills of blue, 
Chiming like silver bells 

When the heart is true. 

Boom with the billows 

On the black shore ; 
Sweetness to bitterness 

Forevermore. 



115 



POEMS 

Sweetly the waters ran, 

(Wild rose for thee) ; 
The fountains of the heart of man 

Are bitter like the sea. 



XXVII 
IN A GARDEN 

SWEET, my Sweet, by the winding-water 
Sit and sing as the days go by. 
(What if the sounding sea had taught her 
Lust of life and the fear to die !) 

Here in the circuit thou hast drawn 
Consult the mayflower and the dew ; 

And peace attend thee on the lawn. 
Beneath a sky forever blue. 

The green be grateful to thine eyes. 

The blue a benediction be ; 
The waters bless thee where they rise ; 

But look not downward to the sea. 

A limpid source of water, silver 
Bubbling up through golden sand. 

Leads, ah ! down to the rolling river, 

Down, ah, down ! to the sounding strand. 

ii6 



POEMS 

There the waves on the shifting margent, 
Night and day with a rhythmic roar, 

Beat and batter the black and argent 
Reef and rock of the sullen shore. 

Spring will rise with a broken wing, 
Crippled in leaf and bud and stem ; 

The winding-water cease to sing. 
The dawn will drop her diadem. 

When thou but once beyond the pale 
Hast learned to look, or dared to see 

The sunrise shattered in the gale. 
The brazen terror of the sea. 

Rather, at rest in what is thine. 
Sip thou the honey as it flows, 

Nor lift thy wing above the line, 
A blind bee in a garden-close. 



117 



POEMS 

XXVIII 

NEPTUNIAN 

MIDWAY the height of one sheer granite 
rock 
I sat in face of the barbarian sea, 
And heard the god, out of the dreadful, deep, 
Midmost Atlantic summoning strength and here. 
In accents clear above the sullen roar 
Of all his waves, condemn the jutting world. 

" Populous Egypt was a realm and ruled 
By men that strove when Greece was yet unborn. 
I strive not, yet is Pharaoh deep in death. 
And still the seas sweep unappeased and new. 
Kings were ere Priam. Knew ye not ? I hold 
The substance, in my swift and solvent brine, 
Of all the race since Adam, and of strange, 
Unfeatured men ere Paradise. And I 
Sang to them all and cradled them and drank 
Their breath, their dust, their family and fame. 
Earth the grain-giver in my hands I hold, 
And if I will I love and if I will 
Hate, and I know no master but the sun. 
Who drinks the years up in a thin blue flame. 
From me the rivers and the rain from me 
Lead down their due-returning silver streams 
In circuit just ; and all the gulfs are mine 
ii8 



POEMS 

Beneath the earth that echo of the deep. 

Laugh then, be glad ! E'en though I swallow down, 

To rock upon my oozy floor, the hulls 

Of odd ten thousand hurrying ships. They swell 

And mantle o'er with all the amorous life 

Ye reck not of, and in a year are gone. 

Laugh and be glad ! Tremble and fear ! I beat, 

Beneath the shining forward of the dawn. 

The dim high noon, and the red stars at night, 

Daylight and dark forever I beat, I beat 

The bulwarks of the shore, daylight and dark, 

With the blue night about me and the dawn." 

On billow billow rolling, in the press 
Confounded of the furious, following surge. 
Thunders the Deep, intolerant and sublime ; 
Gray-heart and grim to spurn of this black rock 
The temerarious front, and here to wrench 
The frame of earth aside before the sea. 



XXIX 
SHAKESPEARE 

THROUGH time untimed, if truly great, 
a Name 
Reverence compels and, that forgotten, shame. 
But in the stress of living you shall scan. 
Yea, touch and censure, great or small, the Man. 

119 



E 



POEMS 

XXX 

THE WATER-CLOCK 

VER with fainter pulse and throw 
The heart's red clepsvdra will flow. 
Then lest the drops run on lo waste, 
Make haste, for love of life, make haste ! 

XXXI 

WE welcome lightly and with ease 
The gifts which providence foresees. 
But relish more the sudden grants 
Of unexpected circumstance. 

XXXII 
IN AUGUST 

WHEN the petal falls and lies 
Wrinkled like a leaf that dies, 
When the flower that once was merry 

Sobers to the russet berry. 
When the rose and hawthorn draws 
Slowly down to hips and haws, 
'T is the season birds are mute, 
'Twixt the flower and the fruit. 

120 



POEMS 

XXXIII 
DOG-DAYS 

EVERY morning dies the sun 
On the eastern horizon, 
And a blazing god is born 
From the white egg of the morn. 

Then the chorus that saluted 
Rosy-fingered dawn is muted^ 
And the spirits of the earth 
Shrink beneath that fiery birth. 

Underneath the green they lie 
Where a water-brook goes by ; 
In a cowslip or, in turn, 
Couched below a fragrant fern. 

You shall find them in the shadow 
Where the woodside meets the meadow ; 
Lift the arum, they are there 
Breathing some cool well of air; 

Waiting in the hopeful grass 
Till the fiery day shall pass, 
Till the flame is laid to rest 
On the red hearse of the west. 



121 



POEMS 



XXXIV 



THROUGH rain the forest, roof and floor, 
Is green as it was ne'er before. 
And, dense along the forest-track. 
The boles of trees were ne'er so black. 

Each driving cataract of rain 
The picture dyes a deeper stain. 
Yet, though the black be blacker seen. 
More vivid glows the vital green. 

XXXV 

FAGOTS 



I 



N Autumn, as the year comes round, 
(The seasons fall without a sound). 
By slow and stealth an ashen hue 
Comes on the green, comes on the blue. 

The sticks I burned beneath a larch 
The first bright day of tawny March, 

Gave out their heat and fell away 

Successive into rose and gray. 

Thus covertly, and term by term, 
Like as the year, I grow infirm ; 

Thus spend my substance like the fire. 
And like the last cold ash expire. 

122 



POEMS 

XXXVI 
OCTOBER 10 

THIS cool white morning by the wall 
How welcome does the sunlight fall 
To the curled aster, with its blue 
Close-folded petals, out of view. 
They open shining to the sun, 
As if their year had just begun ; 
Nor guess, (prophetic in the blast). 
That this warm day miay be the last* 

XXXVII 

For my thoughts are not your thoughts^ neither are 
your ways my ways^ salth the Lord. 

GOD, thou art good, but not to me. 
Some dark, some high and holier plan 
Is hid beyond the world with thee. 
To the immortals, not to man, 
God, thou art good. 

I do conceive thee whollv wise. 

And good beyond the power of touch. 
Eternal lovingkindness lies 

In all thy purposes ; so much 
I do conceive. 

123 



POEMS 

I do confess in thee above, 

All that thy lovers have to thee 

Ascribed, of fellowship and love. 
The words of Jesus on the tree 
I do confess. 



Into thy hands I do commend 

My spirit. All thy ways I trust ; 

In fear acknowledge to the end 
Thy will, and perish with the dust 
Into thy hands. 

God, thou art good, but not to man. 

Thy purposes do not contain 
The mighty things I hope. Thy plan 

Looks past humanity and pain. 
God, thou art good. 



XXXVIII 

THE PINE-TREE 

WHEN blood was in my heart like wine 
I crept beneath a branching pine ; 
With passion drank the piny breath 

And no thought further then than death. 
124 



POEMS 

Now blood is colder and instead 
I mind the liquor of the head, 
Wherein I see, as in a glass. 

The pine decay, the season pass. 

And I have known, with sudden sight, 
A shadow from the pine like night, 
And sorrowing breezes, verse by verse, 
Lament above the spirit's hearse j 

And found some comfort, but not all, 
Where the red needles wove a pall. 
To mark through that dead carpet shine 
The promise of a seedling pine. 



XXXIX 

I DARE not think that thou art by, to stand 
And face omnipotence so near at hand ! 
When I consider thee how must I shrink. 
How must I say, I do not understand, 
I dare not think ! 

I cannot stand before the thought of thee, 
Infinite Fulness of Eternity ! 

So close that all the outlines of the land 
Are lost, — in the inflowing of thy sea 
I cannot stand. 

125 



POEMS 

I think of thee, and as the crystal bowl 
Is broken and the waters of the soul 

Go down to death within the crystal sea, 
I faint and fail when, (thou, the perfect whole), 
I think of thee. 

XL 
THE ANCHOR 

AS when, these autumn days, I ride 
Along the painted country-side, 
Meadow and way and wood go by, 

A never-ending race. 
But yet, beyond their passing, my 
Wachusett holds his place ; 

So let each winged month and year 
Sweep into place and disappear; 
In order seen and loved, be sure ! 

Ere ends its period ; 
But let, beyond them all, endure 
One year, and that be God. 

XLI 

THE frost has walked across my world, 
Has killed the sallows and has curled 
The ferns. Ah, Summer, at what cost. 
For harvest, you invite the frost ! 
126 



POEMS 

XLII 
THE QUIET HARVEST 

WITHIN a thicket ere the sun 
Was up, I heard a whisper run. 
Each bush and tree was bidding, now, 
Its yellow leaves forsake the bough. 
And each leaf, having had its day. 

Stepped down to earth the shortest way, 

In April budding on the tree ; 
In hot July full-blown and free; 
October bids them no more bCc 
I had, I think, as fair a spring ; 
July let equal fortune bring ; 
God give as quiet harvesting. 

XLIII 
THE MAPLE-TREE 

DAY after day I travel down 
From Billerica to the town ; 
Day after day, in passing by 
A cedar-pasture, gray and high, 
See, shining clear and far, (a mile). 
The white church-steeple of Carlisle ; 
And bright between Carlisle and me, 
Daily a glowing maple-tree. 

127 



POEMS 

Suffused with yellow, every part 
Is burning saffron at the heart. 
Upwards and warm the colors gain 
From ruddy gold to claret-stain; 
And downward tending, lightly lean 
To citron yellow and cold green. 
Day after autumn day it still 
More deeply burns against the hill. 
And now I 've made of it a type 
Of hopes, like mine, near autumn-ripe. 
And watch, intent, which first shall be, 
The consummation of the tree. 
Or that gold harvest-hope prepared for me, 



XLIV 
IN MEMORIAM. — PATSEY 

MAXWELL, the master, built above 
His dog this testament of love. 
Where, on a granite block incised. 
These words told how the dog was prized ; 

" Here Patsey lies, by bitter chance 
Dead ere his time, by fates unruly ; 

Stranger, regard this circumstance 

And solemn rite; we loved him truly." 

128 



POEMS 

And quite as if 't had been a man, 
The slow foot of the moss began, 
Envious, to mar this simple state. 
And the poor name t' obliterate. 



XLV 

THE ivy leaves, (behind the shed), 
Turned bright and blushed a rosy red. 
Bit by the frost they sobered down. 
And now can show but russet-brown. 
Another frost and thev will fall. 
And there will be no leaves at all. 

Thus down, through scarlet, gray, and dun, 
The earth will fall into the sun. 



XLVI 
GREEK AND CHRISTIAN 

MAKE haste, my soul, the Wise Man whis- 
pered, go ! 
Gather the golden ears before the snow; 

There is no harvest after death. But low, 
The Shining One replied, It is not so. 

9 129 



POEMS 

XLVII 
DISSOLUTION 

THE leaf will fall, through green and gold, 
To dissolution in the mould. 

The tree will fall, and in the sod 
Complete its final period. 

The night will die when one bright ray 
Shoots up and beckons in the day. 

And that bright ray in turn will lie 

Coffined with all bright things that die; 

Swept out to space, when on this shore 
Leaf, tree, the earth, (which all upbore), 
And day and night shall be no more. 



XL VIII 
NOVEMBER 

THE sun, this old November, 
Across the sodden slope, 
May bid the heart remember, 
But cannot bid it hope. 
130 



POEMS 

XLIX 
AGAINST FORGIVENESS 

WE do not ask to be forgiven, 
Nor out of earth to win 
An unpremeditated heaven, 
Nor quit the claim of sin. 

Our acts be on our head. As yet 
While masterful we live, 

The world we ask not to forget, 
Nor ask God to forgive. 



CONFESSION 

IN Adam's sin 
Did I begin. 

With toil and sweat 
My bread I get ; 

At once, with Abel 
Spread my table. 

Rebel with Cain 
And sin again. 



131 



POEMS 

O'er all the earth, 
(Which is my birth), 

I joy to find 
My human kind ; 

Read in the sky 
That I must die, 

Yet needs must sing 
When it is spring. 

And though I run 
Before the sun, 

By autumn brought 
To steady thought, 

I still rehearse 
The primal curse. 

And in the snow 
Confess my woe. 

Yet here apart. 
Deep in my heart, 

Kin to the sod 
I wait for God. 



132 



POEMS 

LI 

NOVEMBER-BLIND 

IN this November though I bend 
My heart I cannot find a friend 
About the wood. The green is down 
From water-mead to forest crown ; 
(Save where the myrtle in the lane 
Paints the gray sod an emerald stain ; 
Save where the pines below the hill 
Glow with the suns of summer still). 
The hardy juniper to dust 
Corrodes in this autumnal rust. 
The goldenrod and aster-head 
Are black and broke and more than dead. 
This morning, fog about the height 
Creeps up and chokes the growing light ; 
Lies like a blanket through the wood, 
And doubly trebles solitude. 
And when the sun above the mist 
Shall clear a space of amethyst. 
He too shall hunt, November-blind, 
A friend about the wood to find. 



133 



POEMS 

LII 

WINTER A CAVERN 

THROUGH dim November down as through 
an arch, 
I move in cavern darkness until March ; 
Whence looking back, I can no more remember, 
For joy, the days sinister since November. 

LHI 

ON A WEED UNCOVERED BY THE 
RAINS IN DECEMBER 

IN all its grace This was the Solomon's Seal, 
When summer shone. Now winter glooms, 
and here 
On flower and stalk has set his iron heel. 
Another year, my life, another year ! 

LIV 

DECEMBER 

NEW friends forbear, and let old friends 
remember 
With pity him who ends his course to-day ; 
Nor heap with scorn his grave in dead December 
Whose life bore golden promises in May. 



POEMS 

LV 

ISAIAH VI : 13 

'' /% S a teil-tree or an oak," 
XJlSo the ancient prophet spoke, 
" Whose heart remaineth when they shed 
Their leaves ! " The prophet now is dead, 
But on a girl his mantle falls 
And heartens other funerals. 

December stood in confidence, 
Winter long had pitched his tents. 
When she and I together came 
Along a way without a name; 
And there she bade me lift my head 
The while those verses old she said. 

A knotted oak above the snow 
I saw within a pasture grow ; 
A sturdy tree, not over high, — 
Some several inches more than I. 
His leaves were gone, but in the air 
His branches other beauty wear. 

About him little whips of wind 
A wreath of winter sunlight bind. 

135 



POEMS 

The snow upon his feet is cold, 
But in his heart is more than gold. 
And light that only winter knows 
Springs up to blossom on the snows, 



LVI 
NEW ENGLAND 

WHOE'ER thou art, who walkest there 
Where God first taught my feet to roam, 
Breathe but my name into the air, 

I am content, for that is home. 

A sense, a color comes to me,, 

Of baybushes that heavy lie 
With juniper along the sea. 

And the blue sea along the sky. 

New England is my home ; 't is there 
I love the pagan sun and moon. 

'T is there I love the growing year, 

December and young-summer June. 

1 'd rather love one blade of grass 

That grows on one New England hill, 
Than drain the whole world in the glass 

Of fortune, when the heart is still. . 
136 



POEMS 

LVII 
SERENE 

THIS crystal sapphire of the sky 
Is saner far than you and I, 
Who in our passions and our dreams 
Run evermore to wild extremes. 

The pure perfection of the sea 
Lies not in mirth and tragedy ; 
But like the silence of the snows 
In breadth of beauty and repose. 

God give one moment, ere we die, 
As crystal clear as the blue sky, 
Serene as ocean, white as snow. 
And glowing as the heavens glow. 

LVIII 

FROxM Billerica forth I send 
My book. Pray take it for a friend, 
Or should it chance offend you, know 
It is not willingly your foe. 



^27 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

A.D. MDCCCCI 



139 



NOT all the world can banish from my eyes 
The simple glories of the day's sunrise ; 
Not circumstance nor fate e'er drive away 
The clear perfection of one summer day. 
Nor blot quite wholly from my sight 
The singing tumult of the mystic night. 



II 
FOR MARCH 20 

NOW colored lights of morning rise 
And paint the skies 
With warmer dyes, 
A thousand times 
More bright, more rare 
As summer climbs 
The northern stair; 
To where. 

Expecting them with joy and song, 
(Though winter still be on the hill). 
Sits March, his verdant vale along. 
And pipes for Summer with a will. 

Bright jets of flame, the crocus buds 
Out of their beds 
Lift up their heads ; 

141 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Then with a spring 

Above the mold, 

Each purple wing, 

Each wing of gold. 

Unfold ; 

Bright correspondents in the grass 

Of that high incandescent sun. 

Whose bending angels, as they pass. 

Light up the flowers one by one. 

Ill 

THE faithful mullein, day by day. 
Is up and out beside the way. 
Or on the upland pasture blows 
Beside the rockrose and the rose. 

Would heaven had granted me a grace 
One half so perfect as thy face, 
Compounded of so pure a metal 
As thy five-foliate golden petal. 

IV 

A MARCH FLAW 

THE fickle wind, by ebb and flaw, 
Wavers uncertain as a girl : 
The fire delays and will not draw : 

The smoke creeps out in lip and curl ; 
142 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Will not adventure in the skies, 
But level on the pasture lies, 

As if it sought and could not find 
A purpose equal to its mind. 



H 



ERE by the brimming April streams, 
Here is the valley of my dreams. 



Every garden place is seen 
Starting up in flames of green ; 

Breaking forth in yellow gold 
Through the blanket of the mold, 

Slow unfolded, one by one. 
Lantern leaves hang in the sun, 

Like the butterflies of June 
Weak and wet from the cocoon. 



143 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 



VI 



THE bobolink that sweetly sings 
Although the rain is on his wings ; 
The light in darkness of the moon 
That builds by night another noon ; 
• •••••• 

Mine, mine, mine, all mine ! 

The golden light in the sunset pine ; 

The flush green heart of the maple spray 

When the sap comes up in the month of May ; 

The multitudinous, close advance 

Of the singing grass and the little plants; 

The deep, resilient, lusty feel 

Of the turfy carpet under heel ; 

And a wakened heart, that lifts and fills 

Like meadows in the April hills, 

Or when the bottom and the plain 

Are filled with the autumnal rain. 



vn 

APPLE-BLOSSOMS 

LET men remember, when they pray. 
The rose and silver dawns of May, 
Most palely, spiritually gray ; 
144 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

The sky above the blossomed trees, 
Pale as December Arctic seas, 
Pure as the white anemones. 



On such a morning, lightly swung 
By the chance song a bluebird sung, 
The silence like an incense hung. 

A rod away, you 'd scarcely know 
If these were apple-blooms ablow 
Or a reverted April snow; 

But over all the sentient earth 
Young lantern-leaves, for joy of birth. 
Hung out the saffron hues of mirth. 

The honeysucker wove his loom 
Of busy noise from plume to plume 
Of rosy-clustered apple-bloom. 

Went by the bee ; the butterfly 
On soft and papery wings went by. 
Beneath his low, sufficient sky. 

And on a sudden flaw and swell. 

If 't were a petal white that fell, 

Or a blown moth, you 'd hardly tell, 

10 145 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

So soft the air, so hung with scents 
That fell from these white, flowery tents 
On odorous beds of innocents. 

The church bells, by the distance drowned, 
Came to me like the ghost of sound. 
Soft-choired with birds that sang around j 

And dim as distance were the blue 
Slopes, and the hills I thought I knew, 
Behind the mist, and shining through. 



VIII 

ROLL down, roll down, thou darkling earth. 
To the eastern shores of light. 
Where the plashing waves of the morning's birth 
Sweep up the coasts of night. 



IX 

HOT days like this will wound or bless, 
At home as in the wilderness. 
The wind, with burning feet. 
Lingers along the wheat ; 
146 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

The honeysuckle droops; 
The scarlet poppy stoops, 
And on the garden-bed 
Lays down her silken head. 

So in the mountain walk 

Of untrod Moosilauke 

The purple orchis turns 

Black, and the cornel burns. 

Through the dead banks of haze 

The tongues of heaven blaze ; 

And life draws down from flower and shoot, 

To lie in secret at the root. 



WORN with the city, out I go, 
Where the cool green plantations grow ; 
With curious eye observe the shine 
Of silver on the stalwart pine, 
The beech and oak ; on the granite fells 
See the sharp cedar-sentinels 
Advance, each one a shafted thyrse. 
Cone-capped, among the javelin firs. 
Involved by barriers, and perplexed. 
By mere unyielding pavement vexed. 
In spirit from the town I run 
To meet the gracious horizon, 

147 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Which patient round my centre lies 
With axle pointed in the skies; 
In th' unblockaded blue to find 
A clean refreshment for the mind. 



XI 
OCTOBER 10 

SUCH days as this I 've but to look 
And add a page more to my book. 
A bramble, winding o'er the wall, 
A scarlet torrent in the Fall ; 
Sere, yellow leaves, whirled by the train, 
To scatter in a golden rain ; 
A crumpled fern ; — it is enough. 
For all the world is poet's stufF, 
And shall contribute to his book. 
So 't gives the joy the poet took. 

XII 
ON THE TENTH OF OCTOBER 

YOU 'LL not believe the aspen leaf 
(Whose season you would say was brief) 

Hangs long and greener on the tree 
Than sycamore, than hickory. 
148 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

The elm-leaf crumbles brown \ the oak 
Is even sooner gray and broke. 

The maple reddens, and the ash 
Leaps up and falls at Autumn's lash \ 

The aspen leaf will longest stay, 
Be sure ; I saw them green to-day. 



XIII 

UP from hill and meadow burning, 
Fumes of Autumn in the air \ 
Birds in dustv blue returning. 
Passing on their southern fare. 

Color, color, scent and savor. 
How thev penetrate the heart, 

Wake the old delicious quaver ; — 
That is Nature, that is Art. 



XIV 

THREE camping grounds I passed to-day. 
Where, in the months gone by, 
We sat to watch the kettle boil. 
And watch the bacon fry. 

149 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

To-day the needles on the place 

Have fallen thick and sere. 
Ah ! we are growing old apace, 

Year falling after year. 

Where we were born, and where we die, 

Or where we sat at pot. 
Oblivion, like the leaves, shall lie, 

And cover up the spot. 



XV 

PRAYER FOR GRACE 

THE eager frost through all the night 
The oak and walnut leaves did bite. 
To-day the sun, across the dell. 
Shone on them warmly, and they fell. 
Each leaf, the scarlet and the yellow, 
Lay quietly beside his fellow. 

Pray when the frost shall find in place 
Me, I may fall with such a grace. 
And come as quickly to my place. 



150 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

XVI 
IN NOVEMBER 

JUNIPER gentle and rosemarie ! 
There 's neat brown cones on the yellow larch, 
With scarlet haws on the gray thorn-tree. 

Ah, the year is long since the first of March ! 

A leaf is welcome along the lane. 

Periwinkle and wintergreen. 
But they sleep asleep in the icy rain, 

And the wreck of summer is gray between. 

Shafted bennets above the mat 

Of the sodden grass, in the steady wind 

Whistle a warning caveat, 

As the hoarse gray month comes on behind. 

A hungry gull, blown in from sea. 

Comes swift and fierce like a sudden Sin. 

The cold rain creeps on the leafless tree. 
Ah well ! let beautiful death begin. 



151 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 



XVII 

WHAT is this stone, unless some cry 
Shall echo back and give it life ? 
'T is not enough that it be rife 
With history, with history. 



XVIII 

A BEETLE bug has bit my coat 
And ta'en a crescent moon. 
Whether to muffle round his throat 
Or felt a pair of shoon. 
God knows I do not want the part. 
He 's welcome to 't with all my heart 

Only, poor bug, I bid him 'ware 

November fierce and free ! 

The biting frost will soon be here 

To bite more sharp than he. 

If he '11 return, he shall have wool 

To round the crescent moon to full. 



152 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 



XIX 



W 



HAT hard, bright Spirit sits beyond the 



stars, 



On what high seat beyond the round of space ? 
With what benignant, what pernicious face 
Views he the blood, the laughter, and the scars ? 

We may not reach beyond our prison bars. 
He will not bend to touch us in our place. 
We can but lift our heads and strive to trace 
His handiwork in what he makes or mars. 

Nay, imperturbable, with other wars 
Engaged than ours, " I set you in your ways 
Of old," he says ; " prate to me not nor praise, 
But build what joy you may behind your bars." 

In the cold light of evening, or of thought. 

Basalt and adamant he seems, with aught 

More hard, more cold, than ice or emerald ; 

Who says, " I have not heard of heaven or hell " ; 

Benign, pernicious, imperturbable, 

" I Am " alike by Greek and Hebrew called. 



153 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

XX 

DAVID AND JONATHAN 

TT^ IS man with man in the bitter end 

J[ Whatever the love and the heart of woman ; 

Iron with iron, friend with friend, 

The tearless eye and the handclasp human. 

XXI 

THE MYSTIC 

" \ '^^ ^^'" ■'■ ^^^^' much after having striven, 
x\-" We mount close upward to the bar of 
heaven ; 

But all our strength is spent upon the road. 
And cannot take the gift when it is given. 

Doubt is our attitude of mind from birth; 

We cannot see, for memories of earth ; 
We cannot breathe the rich and rarer air. 

To know the beauty and account the worth." 

" And yet," one said, " you will not dare to say 
A man is free to turn his face away. 

Heedless of all the other friends of God, 
And selfishly pursue a silent way ! 

154 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Surely the earth must ever find a place ; 

Surely the human claim is no disgrace." 
— " But he must free himself who dares to mount 

The highest heaven and ask to see God's face." 



XXII 

WHEN the last candle is put out, 
And darkness gray falls round about, 
Shall we lie placid as to-night 
In a blank void of sound and sight ? 
Or in the darkness shall we die. 
Screaming, and all the heart a he ? 



XXIII 

WHAT are the limitations hard, 
Importunate, of time and space. 
But fences of the prison-yard 

Of earth, to keep us in our place ? 

Like snares they catch us at the gate. 

I beat my eager wings in vain. 
Like some caged bird I learn to wait 

Till death shall set me free again ; 

155 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Content to live awhile with these, 

The wards that keep me from the air. 

So at the end I reach the trees 

Of God, and find my freedom there. 



XXIV 

TO G. S. 

[on a postal card] 

IF one lack a new coat 
One may still have a sister! 
Like an oar to a boat. 
Which without it would float. 
Yet not be a good boat — - 
Ah, I ought to have kissed her ! 
If one lack a new coat 
One may still have a sister, 

November 4, 1890. 



156 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

XXV 

THE CHICKADEE'S SONG 

TO G. S. 

GLIMPSED now and again in his pine-tree 
tower, 
A chickadee sang the soft hours away. 
And I could not hear what he had to say, 
For I was sad. 

And he was gay. 
For he was glad, 

And I had no power 
To hear in my heart what he had to say. 

As he sang to the sun and the bright-eyed flowers 
And the golden air, all the world was gray. 
To me all was dead in the dreary day 
For I was sad 

And he was gay. 
And he was glad, 

As the dull-eyed hours 
Rolled on to the close of the dreary day. 

For the eyes of the one alone with the power 
To brighten and lighten the black-cap's play 
Passed me by and were turned away. 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

So I was sad, 

Though the bird was gay; 
Though he was glad 

In his pine-tree tower; 
For her eyes passed me by and were turned away. 

August 15, 1890. 

XXVI 

TO G. S. 

WHAT shall I speak, what phrases here 
compose, 
To tell the love that gathers close, and flows 
Up to the very lips, but cannot pass ? 



I love you, and it is for more than this 
That you have suffered. Where no fruitage is. 
And naught there seems put forth, the very tree 
Itself, entire, a noble fruit may be. 



Life is but life, and who the secret finds 
Of living as you live, in silence binds 
(For God and those of us who understand) 
About her brows a halo from the hand 
Of Christ himself, and bears a lily wand. 
1891. 

158 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

XXVII 
TO G. S. 

PRAY God to give me power to keep 
Life's cureless evils out of sight ; 
Nor wander o'er the world and weep 
The things I cannot do aright. 

Let Manfred's load be bitter-borne, 
And Werther cowardlv outpour 

His sorrows on the world. ... I scorn 
To add one weight to weakness more. 

October, 1892. 



XXVIII 
TO H. L. S. 

I WANDERED on a lonely quest ; 
And deep within a dark forest 
That lightened upward to the skv 
A maiden, with her head borne high, 

Went lightly by. 

159 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

A bending shape, a glancing eye. 
Long slender limbs borne maidenly, 
Bound golden hair, — she trembled lest 
She fright the butterfly at rest 

On either breast. 

So she went on into the west 
Beyond the dark-green, dim forest 
That fell to blackness — all the sky 
Closed down, — when on my lips felt I 

A butterfly ! 



XXIX 

THERE are women in London and Paris and 
Rome 
With the light of the sun in their hair. 
With the color of joy in their eyes and their lips, — 
But the one that I love is n't there. 

The one that I love — ah well! . . . 

I know by the heart's reminder. 
By the leap in the throat and the spring in the 
blood 

The way I must follow to find her. 



i6o 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

'Tis bitter to gallop in Rotten Row 

With the prettiest English girl 
When your heart 's afloat on the western sea 

Where Atlantic breakers curl. 



Then out of a hundred thousand ways 
One way lies shining and bright, 

One way out under the western stars 
To the feet of my heart's delight. 



XXX 

AY by day along the street 
Many a girl I see is sweet ; 
But the lips that should be ripe, 
Pallid like the Indian-pipe. 



D 



These, devoted and forlorn. 
Brave to work and brave to mourn. 
When the world is full of guile 
Think to conquer with a smile. 

Every day I meet some maid 
Born, it seems, to be betrayed ; 

All the substance of desire 

Burning with a paltry fire. 
" i6i 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

These for brief and bitter passion, 
Like the poppy, God will fashion ; 
And the first rough wind that blows 
Lays them broken down in rows. 

Phyllis, when you see the frail 
Fall, and courage not avail, 

Is your true heart not dismayed 

At the fortune of a maid ? 



XXXI 

THE world is crossed at sixes and at sevens, 
Athwart with love. 
Behind their crystal bars 
The silver stars 

Ache in their separate heavens. 
And only these 

Dear human hands on earth have ease. 
To-night indeed I pity the poor trees 
Even in the grove ; 
For though their branches mingle, 
Inwoven and crossed a moment by the breeze, 
Each is forever single. 



162 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 



XXXII 

LOVE is a life you cannot trace 
Nor find by gazing in the face. 
You cannot sum it, pence by pence, 
Nor find it in its elements. 



XXXIII 
\From the French.'] 

THE spring has not so many flowers, 
The yellow shore so many sands, 
So many silver drops the showers 
As I have sorrows at your hands. 



XXXIV 

DEAR heart, that in this world must live and 
die, 
And love, and fix your faith on one to love you, 
How should I live, to think it were not I, 
To stand beside, and touch and hold and prove 
you. 

163 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 



XXXV 

THE hollow chambers of the moon, 
The purple barrens of the deep, 
Do not so cruel silence keep 
As you who put your heart to sleep. 

Believe me, gold is not more pure. 
The oak more steadfast in the wind, 

The sun a flame more strong and sure 
Than is the purpose of his mind 
Who steels his heart to find you so unkind. 



XXXVI 

THE shad-bush, sweetheart, is in flower, 
And tells her secret hour by hour. 
A silent secret she imparts. 
The fragrance of her heart of hearts^ 
Unguessed save by the initiate bee 
And you, as yours, sweetheart, by me. 



xxxvn 

WRECK of the winter upcast into April. 
Buds ? — no buds on the bough as yet. 
Only a hope and a promise of summer 
To spring through the wet. 
164 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Just last night, as the air like water 
Hung, and softened the rigid close. 
Came December down out of the mountains, 
And the lilacs froze. 

Ice, like glass, was on all the forest ; 
Shut like a lid on the steaming brook. 
Blood, that sprang from the heart-roots under, 
The willows forsook. 

So, once more, dear heart, but only 
Once, is the blossom of life betrayed. 
Heart, dear heart, as I love you, tell me 
You are not afraid. 



xxxvni 

MY sisters have their loves, but I 
Am all alone, she said. 
And oh ! the weary wonder Why. 

And oh ! that I were dead. 
Ai me for life and love ! she saith. 
She says, I am in love with death. 

Ai me ! for love is very sweet. 
And hearts are warm to wed ; 

But burn to ashes in defeat 
And loneliness, she said. 

165 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Ai me ! And with her wasting breath 
She says, I am in love with death. 

And when my couch they shall prepare, 
And come for me, she said, 

They '11 bring white roses for my hair, 
And not the roses red. 

Ai me, for life and love ! she saith. 

She says, I am in love with death. 



XXXIX 

RED ROSE AND WHITE 

A RED rose climbed to the casement ; 
Cried, " Open to me ! 
My cry is the call of the passing years, 
I ask for love and the dew of tears 
Withheld by thee." 

I broke the rose at the casement ; 

Cried, " Welcome to thee." 
Ah, red rose dead ! but I could not know 
That only the pale white rose would blow 

On earth for me. 



i66 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 



XL 

I MARK you coming the accustomed way, 
As light as grace, your head uplift and high, 
Gray subtlety of flame in either eye. 
Your hair blown golden by the windy sprays 
And bright about you, darting with the play 
Of beams of tint most delicate and shy, 
A light such as above the eastern sky 
Heralds the dayspring and adorns the day; 

Such crown as, when the gates of June unclose, 
Plays like the veil of rose about the rose ; 
A snare, of grain so delicate, so mighty, 
Not Ares, not Adonis might prevail. 
Thou art the goddess of the golden veil, 
Mistress of men, the woman Aphrodite. 



XLI 

THE extreme beauty and the dear delight, 
Wherewith the world accosts me as I go. 
Catch up the heart, and like a flake of snow 
Ethereal, it dances in the light. 
The music-voices of the day and night 
Charm utterly. In truth, I never know 
Another wish, before the various show 
And concert of the hearing and the sight ! 

167 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Yet were I most unhappy if alone 
Beauty without I courted and adored. 

tyrant Love, peace, then; the world is dumb! 

1 hear my lady calling and I come. 

For love within o'er love without is lord, 
And calls us with a look, a touch, a tone. 



XLII 

I LAUGH for the long days I see ahead, 
Stretching in yellow light where we shall walk. 
And pluck the full-blown roses from the stalk. 
And mallows pale, and poppies deep and red. 
I strive no more. Why, love, my feet are led. 
I have forgot the fears and haste that balk. 
And like a child that 's newly learned to talk 
Tell the new joy whereby I 'm comforted. 

For, dear, you taught me, by your graciousness. 
My highest skill was to be most myself. 
No turn-coat Ghibelline but the true Guelf, 
Filling his faults and virtues to the brim ; 
No more than faithful to himself, no less 
Than true to her who will be true to him. 



i68 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

XLIII 

\_Fragment of a Sonnet y found in a note-book,'] 

IN company . . . with vital hands 
You shape the stuff which is our life, and measure 
With equal pulse our golden warp of pleasure, 
Our scarlet woof of pain, in scarlet strands. 
As if, o'erwearied in a hundred lands. 
Young Aphrodite's self, undone with leisure. 
Should wield the distaff and the silken treasure 
Which Clotho only . . . understands. 
Then, Aphrodite, sister-star and wife, 
Incomprehensible, enact the god. 
Favor at least one mortal with your nod. 
He only has enough who has to spare. 
Bless me with the sweet torment of your life. 
Your love, and the dear wonder of your hair. 



XLIV 

WHEN Love dies, and the funeral plumes 
are set. 
And mourners come to take you by the hand. 
Regard them not ; they do not understand 
Who bid you bless your sorrow and forget. 
When Love has died (if Love should die !) regret 

169 



POSTHUMOUS POEMS 

Will bind you broken in the former land, 

And warp your life with one supreme command 

To tend the dead in love's dark oubliette. 

For you have loved, and all your life is altered. 

And you have lost, and appetite unfed 

Will drive you seeking solace with the dead. 

Be there your life ; and know that, having faltered, 

You seek among the living folk in vain. 

For love is dead. You shall not meet again. 



XLV 

SWAMPSCOTT over the eastern sea. 
And the western wall of the sea is Lynn ; 
And stroke by stroke on the shingle 

The waves come pounding in ; 
Bitter waves of the bitter sea, 

With a music all their own. 
With the awful charm of the Gorgon 

In the look of them and the tone. 
And every wave gave up its soul. 

That passed in a gusty breath, — 
A pulse in the air, that stirred my hair, 

And whispered " Death." 



170 



Ssxx-e :i90 



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